impressive that the stars which we see were gazed on perhaps not less
wonderingly in the very infancy of the human race. It is, again, a
subject full of interest to the chronologist to inquire in what era of
the world's history exact astronomy began, the moon was assigned her
twenty-eight zodiacal mansions, the sun his twelve zodiacal signs. It is
well known, indeed, that Newton himself did not disdain to study the
questions thus suggested; and the speculations of the ingenious Dupuis
found favour with the great mathematician Laplace.

Unfortunately, the evidence is not sufficiently exact to be very
trustworthy. In considering, for instance, the chronological inquiries
of Newton, one cannot but feel that the reliance placed by him on the
statements made by different writers is not justified by the nature of
those statements, which were for the most part vague in the extreme. We
owe many of them to poets who, knowing little of astronomy, mixed up the
phenomena of their own time with those which they found recorded in the
writings of astronomers. Some of the statements left by ancient writers
are indeed ludicrously incongruous; insomuch that Grotius not unjustly
said of the account of the constellations given by the poet Aratus, that
it could be assigned to no fixed epoch and to no fixed place. However,
this would not be the place to discuss details such as are involved in
exact inquiries. I have indicated some of these in an appendix to my
treatise on 'Saturn,' and others in the preface to my 'Gnomonic Star
Atlas'; but for the most part they do not admit very readily of familiar
description. Let us turn to less technical considerations, which
fortunately are in this case fully as much to the point as exact
inquiries, seeing that there is no real foundation for such inquiries in
any of the available evidence.

The first obvious feature of the old constellations is one which somehow
has not received the attention it deserves. It is as instructive as any
of those which have been made the subject of profound research.

There is a great space in the heavens over which none of the old
constellations extend, except the River Eridanus as now pictured, but we
do not know where this winding stream of stars was supposed by the old
observers to come to an end. This great space surrounds the southern
pole of the heavens, and thus shows that the first observers of the
stars were not acquainted with the constellations which can be se