of modern running-grounds.  Other and more recent names for certain constellations are also intelligible.  In Homer’s time the Greeks had two names for the Great Bear; they called it the Bear, or the Wain:  and a certain fanciful likeness to a wain may be made out, though no resemblance to a bear is manifest.  In the United States the same constellation is popularly styled the Dipper, and every one may observe the likeness to a dipper or toddy-ladle.

But these resemblances take us only a little way towards appellations.  We know that we derive many of the names straight from the Greek; but whence did the Greeks get them?  Some, it is said, from the Chaldaeans; but whence did they reach the Chaldaeans?  To this we shall return later, but, as to early Greek star-lore, Goguet, the author of ’L’Origine des Lois,’ a rather learned but too speculative work of the last century, makes the following characteristic remarks:  ’The Greeks received their astronomy from Prometheus.  This prince, as far as history teaches us, made his observations on Mount Caucasus.’  That was the eighteenth century’s method of interpreting mythology.  The myth preserved in the ‘Prometheus Bound’ of AEschylus tells us that Zeus crucified the Titan on Mount Caucasus.  The French philosopher, rejecting the supernatural elements of the tale, makes up his mind that Prometheus was a prince of a scientific bent, and that he established his observatory on the frosty Caucasus.  But, even admitting this, why did Prometheus give the stars animal names?  Goguet easily explains this by a hypothetical account of the manners of primitive men.  ‘The earliest peoples,’ he says, ’must have used writing for purposes of astronomical science.  They would be content to design the constellations of which they wished to speak by the hieroglyphical symbols of their names; hence the constellations have insensibly taken the names of the chief symbols.’  Thus, a drawing of a bear or a swan was the hieroglyphic of the name of a star, or group of stars.  But whence came the name which was represented by the hieroglyphic?  That is precisely what our author forgets to tell us.  But he remarks that the meaning of the hieroglyphic came to be forgotten, and ’the symbols gave rise to all the ridiculous tales about the heavenly signs.’  This explanation is attained by the process of reasoning in a vicious circle from hypothetical premises ascertained to be false.  All the known savages of the world, even those which have scarcely the elements of picture-writing, call the constellations by the names of men and animals, and all tell ‘ridiculous tales’ to account for the names.