dark, and were determined to prevent such accidents in the future.  But the very oddest example of the survival of the notion that the stars are men or women is found in the ‘Pax’ of Aristophanes.  Trygaeus in that comedy has just made an expedition to heaven.  A slave meets him, and asks him, ’Is not the story true, then, that we become stars when we die?’ The answer is ‘Certainly;’ and Trygaeus points out the star into which Ios of Chios has just been metamorphosed.  Aristophanes is making fun of some popular Greek superstition.  But that very superstition meets us in New Zealand.  ‘Heroes,’ says Mr. Taylor, ’were thought to become stars of greater or less brightness, according to the number of their victims slain in fight.’  The Aryan race is seldom far behind, when there are ludicrous notions to be credited or savage tales to be told.  We have seen that Aristophanes, in Greece, knew the Eskimo doctrine that stars are souls of the dead.  The Persians had the same belief, {134a} ’all the unnumbered stars were reckoned ghosts of men.’ {134b} The German folklore clings to the same belief, ’Stars are souls; when a child dies God makes a new star.’  Kaegi quotes {134c} the same idea from the Veda, and from the Satapatha Brahmana the thoroughly Australian notion that ‘good men become stars.’  For a truly savage conception, it would be difficult, in South Africa or on the Amazons, to beat the following story from the ‘Aitareya Brahmana’ (iii. 33.) Pragapati, the Master of Life, conceived an incestuous passion for his own daughter.  Like Zeus, and Indra, and the Australian wooer in the Pleiad tale, he concealed himself under the shape of a beast, a roebuck, and approached his own daughter, who had assumed the form of a doe.  The gods, in anger at the awful crime, made a monster to punish Pragapati.  The monster sent an arrow through the god’s body; he sprang into heaven, and, like the Arcadian bear, this Aryan roebuck became a constellation.  He is among the stars of Orion, and his punisher, also now a star, is, like the Greek Orion, a hunter.  The daughter of Pragapati, the doe, became another constellation, and the avenging arrow is also a set of stars in the sky.  What follows, about the origin of the gods called Adityas, is really too savage to be quoted by a chaste mythologist.

It would be easy to multiply examples of this stage of thought among Aryans and savages.  But we have probably brought forward enough for our purpose, and have expressly chosen instances from the most widely separated peoples.  These instances, it will perhaps be admitted, suggest, if they do not prove, that the Greeks had received from tradition precisely the same sort of legends about the heavenly bodies as are current among Eskimo and Bushmen, New Zealanders and Iowas.  As much, indeed, might be inferred from our own astronomical nomenclature.  We now give to newly discovered stars names derived from distinguished people, as Georgium Sidus, or Herschel; or, again, merely technical