stantly
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,[154] 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
_Metamorph