s, in the _Migration
Legend of the Greeks_ (Brinton, Philadelphia. 1884).

[128] _Herodotos_, p. 204.

[129] Wilkinson, iii. 249, quoting the Ritual xxxiii.: 'Thou devourest
the abominable rat of Ra, or the Sun.'

[130] Mr. Loftie has kindly shown me a green mouse containing the
throne-name of Thothmes III. The animals thus used as substitutes for
scarabs were also sacred, as the fish, rhinoceros, fly, all
represented in Mr. Loftie's collection. See his _Essay of Scarabs_, p.
27. It may be admitted that, in a country where Cats were gods, the
religion of the Mouse must have been struggling and oppressed.

[Illustration: {Two examples of scarab substitutes}]

[131] Strabo, xiii. 604.

[132] Eustathius on _Iliad_, i. 39.

[133] _A Strange and True Relation of the Prodigious Multitude of
Mice_, 1670.

[134] _Journal of Philol._, xvii. p. 96.

[135] Leviticus xi. 29.

[136] Samuel i. 5, 6.

[137] _Zool. Myth._, ii. 68.

[138] _Melusine_, N.S. i.

[139] _De Iside et Osiride_, lxxvi.

[140] This hypothesis does not maintain that totemism prevailed in
Greece during historic times. Though Plutarch mentions a Carian
~genos~, the Ioxidae, of Attic descent, which revered asparagus, it is
probable that genuine totemism had died out of Greece many hundreds of
years before even Homer's time. But this view is not inconsistent with
the existence of survivals in religion and ritual.

[141] Rolland, _Faune populaire_.

_STAR MYTHS._

Artemus Ward used to say that, while there were many things in the
science of astronomy hard to be understood, there was one fact which
entirely puzzled him. He could partly perceive how we 'weigh the sun,'
and ascertain the component elements of the heavenly bodies, by the
aid of _spectrum_ analysis. 'But what beats me about the stars,' he
observed plaintively, 'is how we come to know their names.' This
question, or rather the somewhat similar question, 'How did the
constellations come by their very peculiar names?' has puzzled
Professor Pritchard and other astronomers more serious than Artemus
Ward. Why is a group of stars called the _Bear_, or the _Swan_, or the
_Twins_, or named after the _Pleiades_, the fair daughters of the
Giant Atlas?[142] These are difficulties that meet even children when
they examine a 'celestial globe.' There they find the figure of a
bear, traced out with lines in the intervals between the stars of the
constellations, while a very imposing giant i