e Alexander overcame
Codomannus with dorn, "the spear." A certain passage in the Alps is
called Scaletta, from its resemblance to a staircase; but according to a
local tradition it owes its name to the bleaching skeletons of a
company of Moors who were destroyed there in the eighth century, while
attempting to penetrate into Northern Italy. The name of Antwerp denotes
the town built at a "wharf"; but it sounds very much like the Flemish
handt werpen, "hand-throwing": "hence arose the legend of the giant
who cut of the hands of those who passed his castle without paying him
black-mail, and threw them into the Scheldt." [68] In the myth of Bishop
Hatto, related in a previous paper, the Mause-thurm is a corruption of
maut-thurm; it means "customs-tower," and has nothing to do with mice
or rats. Doubtless this etymology was the cause of the floating myth
getting fastened to this particular place; that it did not give rise
to the myth itself is shown by the existence of the same tale in other
places. Somewhere in England there is a place called Chateau Vert; the
peasantry have corrupted it into Shotover, and say that it has
borne that name ever since Little John shot over a high hill in the
neighbourhood. [69] Latium means "the flat land"; but, according to
Virgil, it is the place where Saturn once hid (latuisset) from the wrath
of his usurping son Jupiter. [70]

It was in this way that the constellation of the Great Bear received
its name. The Greek word arktos, answering to the Sanskrit riksha, meant
originally any bright object, and was applied to the bear--for what
reason it would not be easy to state--and to that constellation which
was most conspicuous in the latitude of the early home of the Aryans.
When the Greeks had long forgotten why these stars were called arktoi,
they symbolized them as a Great Bear fixed in the sky. So that, as
Max Muller observes, "the name of the Arctic regions rests on a
misunderstanding of a name framed thousands of years ago in Central
Asia, and the surprise with which many a thoughtful observer has looked
at these seven bright stars, wondering why they were ever called the
Bear, is removed by a reference to the early annals of human speech."
Among the Algonquins the sun-god Michabo was represented as a hare, his
name being compounded of michi, "great," and wabos, "a hare"; yet wabos
also meant "white," so that the god was doubtless originally called
simply "the Great White One." The same