ust as the flint and bone
weapons of rude races resemble each other much more than they resemble
the metal weapons and the artillery of advanced peoples, so the mental
products, the fairy tales, and myths of rude races have everywhere a
strong family resemblance. They are produced by men in similar mental
conditions of ignorance, curiosity, and credulous fancy, and they are
intended to supply the same needs, partly of amusing narrative, partly of
crude explanation of familiar phenomena.

Now it is time to prove the truth of our assertion that the star-stories
of savage and of civilised races closely resemble each other. Let us
begin with that well-known group the Pleiades. The peculiarity of the
Pleiades is that the group consists of seven stars, of which one is so
dim that it seems entirely to disappear, and many persons can only detect
its presence through a telescope. The Greeks had a myth to account for
the vanishing of the lost Pleiad. The tale is given in the
'Catasterismoi' (stories of metamorphoses into stars) attributed to
Eratosthenes. This work was probably written after our era; but the
author derived his information from older treatises now lost. According
to the Greek myth, then, the seven stars of the Pleiad were seven
maidens, daughters of the Giant Atlas. Six of them had gods for lovers;
Poseidon admired two of them, Zeus three, and Ares one; but the seventh
had only an earthly wooer, and when all of them were changed into stars,
the maiden with the mortal lover hid her light for shame.

Now let us compare the Australian story. According to Mr. Dawson
('Australian Aborigines'), a writer who understands the natives well,
'their knowledge of the heavenly bodies greatly exceeds that of most
white people,' and 'is taught by men selected for their intelligence and
information. The knowledge is important to the aborigines on their night
journeys;' so we may be sure that the natives are careful observers of
the heavens, and are likely to be conservative of their astronomical
myths. The 'Lost Pleiad' has not escaped them, and this is how they
account for her disappearance. The Pirt Kopan noot tribe have a
tradition that the Pleiades were a queen and her six attendants. Long
ago the Crow (our Canopus) fell in love with the queen, who refused to be
his wife. The Crow found that the queen and her six maidens, like other
Australian gins, were in the habit of hunting for white edible grubs in
the bark