appellatives, as Alpha, Beta, and the rest.  We should never think when ’some new planet swims into our ken’ of calling it Kangaroo, or Rabbit, or after the name of some hero of romance, as Rob Roy, or Count Fosco.  But the names of stars which we inherit from Greek mythology—­the Bear, the Pleiads, Castor and Pollux, and so forth—­are such as no people in our mental condition would originally think of bestowing.  When Callimachus and the courtly astronomers of Alexandria pretended that the golden locks of Berenice were raised to the heavens, that was a mere piece of flattery constructed on the inherited model of legends about the crown (Corona) of Ariadne.  It seems evident enough that the older Greek names of stars are derived from a time when the ancestors of the Greeks were in the mental and imaginative condition of Iowas, Kanekas, Bushmen, Murri, and New Zealanders.  All these, and all other savage peoples, believe in a kind of equality and intercommunion among all things animate and inanimate.  Stones are supposed in the Pacific Islands to be male and female and to propagate their species.  Animals are believed to have human or superhuman intelligence, and speech, if they choose to exercise the gift.  Stars are just on the same footing, and their movements are explained by the same ready system of universal anthropomorphism.  Stars, fishes, gods, heroes, men, trees, clouds, and animals, all play their equal part in the confused dramas of savage thought and savage mythology.  Even in practical life the change of a sorcerer into an animal is accepted as a familiar phenomenon, and the power of soaring among the stars is one on which the Australian Biraark, or the Eskimo Shaman, most plumes himself.  It is not wonderful that things which are held possible in daily practice should be frequent features of mythology.  Hence the ready invention and belief of star-legends, which in their turn fix the names of the heavenly bodies.  Nothing more, except the extreme tenacity of tradition and the inconvenience of changing a widely accepted name, is needed to account for the human and animal names of the stars.  The Greeks received from the dateless past of savage intellect the myths, and the names of the constellations, and we have taken them, without inquiry, from the Greeks.  Thus it happens that our celestial globes are just as queer menageries as any globes could be that were illustrated by Australians or American Indians, by Bushmen or Peruvian aborigines, or Eskimo.  It was savages, we may be tolerably certain, who first handed to science the names of the constellations, and provided Greece with the raw material of her astronomical myths—­as Bacon prettily says, that we listen to the harsh ideas of earlier peoples ’blown softly through the flutes of the Grecians.’