re believed to have human or
superhuman intelligence, and speech, if they choose to exercise the gift.
Stars are just on the same footing, and their movements are explained by
the same ready system of universal anthropomorphism. Stars, fishes,
gods, heroes, men, trees, clouds, and animals, all play their equal part
in the confused dramas of savage thought and savage mythology. Even in
practical life the change of a sorcerer into an animal is accepted as a
familiar phenomenon, and the power of soaring among the stars is one on
which the Australian Biraark, or the Eskimo Shaman, most plumes himself.
It is not wonderful that things which are held possible in daily practice
should be frequent features of mythology. Hence the ready invention and
belief of star-legends, which in their turn fix the names of the heavenly
bodies. Nothing more, except the extreme tenacity of tradition and the
inconvenience of changing a widely accepted name, is needed to account
for the human and animal names of the stars. The Greeks received from
the dateless past of savage intellect the myths, and the names of the
constellations, and we have taken them, without inquiry, from the Greeks.
Thus it happens that our celestial globes are just as queer menageries as
any globes could be that were illustrated by Australians or American
Indians, by Bushmen or Peruvian aborigines, or Eskimo. It was savages,
we may be tolerably certain, who first handed to science the names of the
constellations, and provided Greece with the raw material of her
astronomical myths--as Bacon prettily says, that we listen to the harsh
ideas of earlier peoples 'blown softly through the flutes of the
Grecians.'

This position has been disputed by Mr. Brown, in a work rather komically
called 'The Law of Kosmic Order.' Mr. Brown's theory is that the early
Accadians named the zodiacal signs after certain myths and festivals
connected with the months. Thus the crab is a figure of 'the darkness
power' which seized the Akkadian solar hero, Dumuzi, and 'which is
constantly 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 tha