a 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 Austrian 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 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 _Pleiades_, _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