Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/47

Rh an asterism that figures on modern star maps. The observations of Hipparchus were made between 162 and 127 , while those of Ptolemy embodied in the Syntaxis, as his work was entitled, were made from 127 to 151

The Syntaxis was practically an epitome of the results of the early star-gazers of Greece and Western Asia, and comprised a list of 1028 stars classified in forty-eight constellations. Each star is named by its position in the figure supposed to include the stars of the group. Thus the constellation Draco contains thirty-one stars, some of which received the following descriptive names: "the star upon the tongue," "the star in the mouth," "the star above the eye," etc. This method of naming the stars continued in use until the eighteenth century, when a letter or a number with the Latin genitive of the constellation was used. In Ptolemy's catalogue appears the first comparative list of stellar magnitudes.

The constellations of the Greeks were ultimately accepted and adopted by the Persians, Hindus, Arabs, the nations of Western Asia, and the Romans, from whom they have been borrowed by the modern world. To Greece, then, we are indebted for the figures now depicted on our celestial globes and the many interesting myths associated with them, notably the legend of Perseus and Andromeda, which is fully illustrated in the starry skies.

Although the savages of prehistoric times first bequeathed the stellar configurations to science, we listen to their harsh ideas, as Bacon puts it, "as they come to us blown softly through the flutes of the Grecians."

From the time of Ptolemy till the year 1252, no advance of importance was made in the matter of cataloguing the stars, but in this latter year there appeared the celebrated Alphonsine Tables compiled by Arabian or Moorish astronomers at Toledo under the auspices of the subsequent King Alphonso X., known as "the Wise."

A correction of Ptolemy's sphere was published by the Arabian astronomer Ulugh Beg in 1420, in which there