Now let us compare the Australian story.  According to Mr. Dawson (’Australian Aborigines’), a writer who understands the natives well, ’their knowledge of the heavenly bodies greatly exceeds that of most white people,’ and ’is taught by men selected for their intelligence and information.  The knowledge is important to the aborigines on their night journeys;’ so we may be sure that the natives are careful observers of the heavens, and are likely to be conservative of their astronomical myths.  The ‘Lost Pleiad’ has not escaped them, and this is how they account for her disappearance.  The Pirt Kopan noot tribe have a tradition that the Pleiades were a queen and her six attendants.  Long ago the Crow (our Canopus) fell in love with the queen, who refused to be his wife.  The Crow found that the queen and her six maidens, like other Australian gins, were in the habit of hunting for white edible grubs in the bark of trees.  The Crow at once changed himself into a grub (just as Jupiter and Indra used to change into swans, horses, ants, or what not) and hid in the bark of a tree.  The six maidens sought to pick him out with their wooden hooks, but he broke the points of all the hooks.  Then came the queen, with her pretty bone hook; he let himself be drawn out, took the shape of a giant, and ran away with her.  Ever since there have only been six stars, the six maidens, in the Pleiad.  This story is well known, by the strictest inquiry, to be current among the blacks of the West District and in South Australia.

Mr. Tylor, whose opinion is entitled to the highest respect, thinks that this may be a European myth, told by some settler to a black in the Greek form, and then spread about among the natives.  He complains that the story of the loss of the brightest star does not fit the facts of the case.

We do not know, and how can the Australians know, that the lost star was once the brightest?  It appears to me that the Australians, remarking the disappearances of a star, might very naturally suppose that the Crow had selected for his wife that one which had been the most brilliant of the cluster.  Besides, the wide distribution of the tale among the natives, and the very great change in the nature of the incidents, seem to point to a native origin.  Though the main conception—­the loss of one out of seven maidens—­is identical in Greek and in Murri, the manner of the disappearance is eminently Hellenic in the one case, eminently savage in the other.  However this may be, nothing of course is proved by a single example.  Let us next examine the stars Castor and Pollux.  Both in Greece and in Australia these are said once to have been two young men.  In the ‘Catasterismoi,’ already spoken of, we read:  ’The Twins, or Dioscouroi.—­They were nurtured in Lacedaemon, and were famous for their brotherly love, wherefore, Zeus, desiring to make their memory immortal, placed them both among the stars.’  In Australia,