bears, though the animal called the native bear is looked up to by the
aborigines with superstitious regard. But among the North American
Indians, as the old missionaries Lafitau and Charlevoix observed, 'the
four stars in front of our constellation are a bear; those in the tail
are hunters who pursue him; the small star apart is the pot in which they
mean to cook him.'

It may be held that the Red Men derived their bear from the European
settlers. But, as we have seen, an exact knowledge of the stars has
always been useful if not essential to savages; and we venture to doubt
whether they would confuse their nomenclature and sacred traditions by
borrowing terms from trappers and squatters. But, if this is improbable,
it seems almost impossible that all savage races should have borrowed
their whole conception of the heavenly bodies from the myths of Greece.
It is thus that Egede, a missionary of the last century, describes the
Eskimo philosophy of the stars: 'The notions that the Greenlanders have
as to the origin of the heavenly lights--as sun, moon, and stars--are
very nonsensical; in that they pretend they have formerly been as many of
their own ancestors, who, on different accounts, were lifted up to
heaven, and became such glorious celestial bodies.' Again, he writes:
'Their notions about the stars are that some of them have been men, and
others different sorts, of animals and fishes.' But every reader of Ovid
knows that this was the very mythical theory of the Greeks and Romans.
The Egyptians, again, worshipped Osiris, Isis, and the rest as
_ancestors_, and there are even modern scholars, like Mr. Loftie in his
'Essay of Scarabs,' who hold Osiris to have been originally a real
historical person. But the Egyptian priests who showed Plutarch the
grave of Osiris, showed him, too, the stars into which Osiris, Isis, and
Horus had been metamorphosed. Here, then, we have Greeks, Egyptians, and
Eskimo, all agreed about the origin of the heavenly lights, all of