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
Pleiads, 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 evident enough that the older Greek names of stars are
derived from a time when the ancestors of the Greeks were in the mental
and imaginative condition of Iowas, Kanekas, Bushmen, Murri, and New
Zealanders. All these, and all other savage peoples, believe in a kind
of equality and intercommunion among all things animate and inanimate.
Stones are supposed in the Pacific Islands to be male and female and to
propagate their species. Animals a