ient poetry. These names, in turn, have curiously affected human
beliefs. Astrology is based on the opinion that a man's character and
fate are determined by the stars under which he is born. And the nature
of these stars is deduced from their names, so that the bear should have
been found in the horoscope of Dr. Johnson. When Giordano Bruno wrote
his satire against religion, the famous 'Spaccio della bestia
trionfante,' he proposed to banish not only the gods but the beasts from
heaven. He would call the stars, not the Bear, or the Swan, or the
Pleiads, but Truth, Mercy, Justice, and so forth, that men might be born,
not under bestial, but moral influences. But the beasts have had too
long possession of the stars to be easily dislodged, and the tenure of
the Bear and the Swan will probably last as long as there is a science of
Astronomy. Their names are not likely again to delude a philosopher into
the opinion of Aristotle that the stars are animated.

This argument had been worked out to the writer's satisfaction when he
chanced to light on Mr. Max Muller's explanation of the name of the Great
Bear. We have explained that name as only one out of countless similar
appellations which men of every race give to the stars. These names,
again, we have accounted for as the result of savage philosophy, which
takes no great distinction between man and the things in the world, and
looks on stars, beasts, birds, fishes, flowers, and trees as men and
women in disguise. Mr. Muller's theory is based on philological
considerations. He thinks that the name of the Great Bear is the result
of a mistake as to the meaning of words. There was in Sanskrit, he says,
{140} a root ark, or arch, meaning 'to be bright.' The stars are called
riksha, that is, bright ones, in the Veda. 'The constellations here
called the Rikshas, in the sense of the "bright ones," would be
homonymous in Sanskrit with the Bears. Remember also that, apparently
without rhyme or reason, the same constellation is called by Greeks and
Romans the Bear. . . . There is not the shadow of a likeness with a
bear. You will now perceive the influence of words on thought, or the
spontaneous growth of mythology. The name Riksha was applied to the bear
in the sense of the bright fuscous animal, and in that sense it became
most popular in the later Sanskrit, and in Greek and Latin. The same
name, "in the sense of the bright ones," had been applied by the Vedic
poe