This position has been disputed by Mr. Brown, in a work rather komically called ‘The Law of Kosmic Order.’  Mr. Brown’s theory is that the early Accadians named the zodiacal signs after certain myths and festivals connected with the months.  Thus the crab is a figure of ’the darkness power’ which seized the Akkadian solar hero, Dumuzi, and ’which is constantly represented in monstrous and drakontic form.’  The bull, again, is connected with night and darkness, ’in relation to the horned moon,’ and is, for other reasons, ‘a nocturnal potency.’  Few stars, to tell the truth, are diurnal potencies.  Mr. Brown’s explanations appear to me far-fetched and unconvincing.  But, granting that the zodiacal signs reached Greece from Chaldaea, Mr. Brown will hardly maintain that Australians, Melanesians, Iowas, Amazon Indians, Eskimo, and the rest, borrowed their human and animal stars from ‘Akkadia.’  The belief in animal and human stars is practically universal among savages who have not attained the ‘Akkadian’ degree of culture.  The belief, as Mr. Tylor has shown, {137} is a natural result of savage ideas.  We therefore infer that the ‘Akkadians,’ too, probably fell back for star-names on what they inherited from the savage past.  If the Greeks borrowed certain star-names from the Akkadians, they also, like the Aryans of India, retained plenty of savage star-myths of their own, fables derived from the earliest astronomical guesses of early thought.

The first moment in astronomical science arrives when the savage, looking at a star, says, like the child in the nursery poem, ’How I wonder what you are!’ The next moment comes when the savage has made his first rough practical observations of the movements of the heavenly body.  His third step is to explain these to himself.  Now science cannot offer any but a fanciful explanation beyond the sphere of experience.  The experience of the savage is limited to the narrow world of his tribe, and of the beasts, birds, and fishes of his district.  His philosophy, therefore, accounts for all phenomena on the supposition that the laws of the animate nature he observes are working everywhere.  But his observations, misguided by his crude magical superstitions, have led him to believe in a state of equality and kinship between men and animals, and even inorganic things.  He often worships the very beasts he slays; he addresses them as if they understood him; he believes himself to be descended from the animals, and of their kindred.  These confused ideas he applies to the stars, and recognises in them men like himself, or beasts like those with which he conceives himself to be in such close human relations.  There is scarcely a bird or beast but the Red Indian or the Australian will explain its peculiarities by a myth, like a page from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses.’  It was once a man or a woman, and has been changed to bird or beast by a god or a magician.  Men, again, have originally been beasts, in his philosophy, and