are descended from wolves, frogs or serpents, or monkeys.  The heavenly bodies are traced to precisely the same sort of origin; and hence, we conclude, come their strange animal names, and the strange myths about them which appear in all ancient 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 poets to the stars in general, and more particularly to that constellation which in the northern parts of India was the most prominent.  The etymological meaning, “the bright stars,” was forgotten; the popular meaning of Riksha (bear) was known to everyone.  And thus it happened that, when the Greeks had left their central home and settled in Europe, they retained the name of Arktos for the same unchanging stars; but, not knowing why those stars had originally received that name, they ceased to speak of them as arktoi, or many bears, and spoke of them as the Bear.’