Page:Star Lore Of All Ages, 1911.pdf/473

Rh ," the Hunting Dogs. No one can recognise a bear in the present figure of the constellation, but Proctor says that one who looks attentively at the part of the skies occupied by the constellation will recognise, if they are imaginative, a monstrous bear with the proper small head of creatures of the bear family, and with exceedingly well developed plantigrade feet.

The feet of the Bear are marked by three pairs of stars strikingly arranged, and Maunder agrees with Proctor in considering that these conspicuous stars suggested the feet of a great plantigrade animal. Of course the figure cannot at all times be recognised with equal facility, but before midnight during the last four or five months in the year the Bear is seen, either upright in the heavens, or as if descending a slope, and favourably situated for observing.

Stories of the descent of tribes from animals are wide-spread among the ancient annals of the race, the Akkadians, Australians, red Indians, Bushmen, Bedouins, and other wild races believing that they sprang from such a source. The Akkadians considered that they were descended 1from a bear, and hence transferred the creature in fancy to the stars. They were known among the ancients as "the Bear Folk."

The growth of the Bear from his original seven stars was obviously prompted by a desire to make the animal correspond in size to the long tail which appeared in the original figure. The stars adapted themselves fairly well for the purpose, and there was no other constellation in the way.

The Tower of Babel, the most ancient of temples, was called "the Temple of the Seven Lights," or "the Celestial Earth." It embodied the astronomical kingdoms 1of antiquity.

The seven lights were, it has been thought, the seven stars of the Great Dipper.

Mythology links together in one story the constellations of the Greater and Lesser Bears: