men, but young women, the
wives of the Eland, the great native antelope. In Greek star-stories the
Great Bear keeps watch, Homer says, on the hunter Orion for fear of a
sudden attack. But how did the Bear get its name in Greece? According
to Hesiod, the oldest Greek poet after Homer, the Bear was once a lady,
daughter of Lycaon, King of Arcadia. She was a nymph of the train of
chaste Artemis, but yielded to the love of Zeus, and became the
ancestress of all the Arcadians (that is, Bear-folk). In her bestial
form she was just about to be slain by her own son when Zeus rescued her
by raising her to the stars. Here we must notice first, that the
Arcadians, like Australians, Red Indians, Bushmen, and many other wild
races, and like the Bedouins, believed themselves to be descended from an
animal. That the early Egyptians did the same is not improbable; for
names of animals are found among the ancestors in the very oldest
genealogical papyrus, {128} as in the genealogies of the old English
kings. Next the Arcadians transferred the ancestral bear to the heavens,
and, in doing this, they resembled the Peruvians, of whom Acosta says:
'They adored the star Urchuchilly, feigning it to be a Ram, and
worshipped two others, and say that one of them is a _sheep_, and the
other a lamb . . . others worshipped the star called the Tiger. _They
were of opinion that there was not any beast or bird upon the earth,
whose shape or image did not shine in the heavens_.'

But to return to our bears. The Australians have, properly speaking, no
bears, though the animal called the native bear is looked up to by the
aborigines with superstitious regard. But among the North American
Indians, as the old missionaries Lafitau and Charlevoix observed, 'the
four stars in front of our constellation are a bear; those in the tail
are hunters who pursue him; the small star apart is the pot in which they
mean to cook him.'

It may be held that the Red Men derived their bear from the European
settlers. But, as we have seen, an exact knowledge of the stars has
always been useful if not essential to savages; and we venture to doubt
whether they would confuse their nomenclature and sacred traditions by
borrowing terms from trappers and squatters. But, if this is improbable,
it seems almost impossible that all savage races should have borrowed
their whole conception of the heavenly bodies from the myths of Greece.
It is thus that Egede, a missionary o