according to Mr. Brough Smyth (’Aborigines of Victoria’), Turree (Castor) and Wanjel (Pollux) are two young men who pursue Purra and kill him at the commencement of the great heat.  Coonar toorung (the mirage) is the smoke of the fire by which they roast him.  In Greece it was not Castor and Pollux, but Orion who was the great hunter placed among the stars.  Among the Bushmen of South Africa, Castor and Pollux are not young men, but young women, the wives of the Eland, the great native antelope.  In Greek star-stories the Great Bear keeps watch, Homer says, on the hunter Orion for fear of a sudden attack.  But how did the Bear get its name in Greece?  According to Hesiod, the oldest Greek poet after Homer, the Bear was once a lady, daughter of Lycaon, King of Arcadia.  She was a nymph of the train of chaste Artemis, but yielded to the love of Zeus, and became the ancestress of all the Arcadians (that is, Bear-folk).  In her bestial form she was just about to be slain by her own son when Zeus rescued her by raising her to the stars.  Here we must notice first, that the Arcadians, like Australians, Red Indians, Bushmen, and many other wild races, and like the Bedouins, believed themselves to be descended from an animal.  That the early Egyptians did the same is not improbable; for names of animals are found among the ancestors in the very oldest genealogical papyrus, {128} as in the genealogies of the old English kings.  Next the Arcadians transferred the ancestral bear to the heavens, and, in doing this, they resembled the Peruvians, of whom Acosta says:  ’They adored the star Urchuchilly, feigning it to be a Ram, and worshipped two others, and say that one of them is a sheep, and the other a lamb . . . others worshipped the star called the Tiger. They were of opinion that there was not any beast or bird upon the earth, whose shape or image did not shine in the heavens.’

But to return to our bears.  The Australians have, properly speaking, no bears, though the animal called the native bear is looked up to by the aborigines with superstitious regard.  But among the North American Indians, as the old missionaries Lafitau and Charlevoix observed, ’the four stars in front of our constellation are a bear; those in the tail are hunters who pursue him; the small star apart is the pot in which they mean to cook him.’

It may be held that the Red Men derived their bear from the European settlers.  But, as we have seen, an exact knowledge of the stars has always been useful if not essential to savages; and we venture to doubt whether they would confuse their nomenclature and sacred traditions by borrowing terms from trappers and squatters.  But, if this is improbable, it seems almost impossible that all savage races should have borrowed their whole conception of the heavenly bodies from the myths of Greece.  It is thus that Egede, a missionary of the last century, describes the Eskimo philosophy of the stars:  ’The