As the star-stories told by the Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, and other civilised people of the old world, exactly correspond in character, and sometimes even in incident, with the star-stories of modern savages, we have the choice of three hypotheses to explain this curious coincidence.  Perhaps the star-stories, about nymphs changed into bears, and bears changed into stars, were invented by the civilised races of old, and gradually found their way amongst people like the Eskimo, and the Australians, and Bushmen.  Or it may be insisted that the ancestors of Australians, Eskimo, and Bushmen were once civilised, like the Greeks and Egyptians, and invented star-stories, still remembered by their degenerate descendants.  These are the two forms of the explanation which will be advanced by persons who believe that the star-stories were originally the fruit of the civilised imagination.  The third theory would be, that the ‘ridiculous tales’ about the stars were originally the work of the savage imagination, and that the Greeks, Chaldaeans, and Egyptians, when they became civilised, retained the old myths that their ancestors had invented when they were savages.  In favour of this theory it may be said, briefly, that there is no proof that the fathers of Australians, Eskimo, and Bushmen had ever been civilised, while there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the fathers of the Greeks had once been savages. {125} And, if we incline to the theory that the star-myths are the creation of savage fancy, we at once learn why they are, in all parts of the world, so much alike.  Just as the flint and bone weapons of rude races resemble each other much more than they resemble the metal weapons and the artillery of advanced peoples, so the mental products, the fairy tales, and myths of rude races have everywhere a strong family resemblance.  They are produced by men in similar mental conditions of ignorance, curiosity, and credulous fancy, and they are intended to supply the same needs, partly of amusing narrative, partly of crude explanation of familiar phenomena.

Now it is time to prove the truth of our assertion that the star-stories of savage and of civilised races closely resemble each other.  Let us begin with that well-known group the Pleiades.  The peculiarity of the Pleiades is that the group consists of seven stars, of which one is so dim that it seems entirely to disappear, and many persons can only detect its presence through a telescope.  The Greeks had a myth to account for the vanishing of the lost Pleiad.  The tale is given in the ‘Catasterismoi’ (stories of metamorphoses into stars) attributed to Eratosthenes.  This work was probably written after our era; but the author derived his information from older treatises now lost.  According to the Greek myth, then, the seven stars of the Pleiad were seven maidens, daughters of the Giant Atlas.  Six of them had gods for lovers; Poseidon admired two of them, Zeus three, and Ares one; but the seventh had only an earthly wooer, and when all of them were changed into stars, the maiden with the mortal lover hid her light for shame.