the fair daughters of the Giant Atlas? {121} These are difficulties that
meet even children when they examine a 'celestial globe.' There they
find the figure of a bear, traced out with lines in the intervals between
the stars of the constellations, while a very imposing giant is so drawn
that Orion's belt just fits his waist. But when he comes to look at the
heavens, the infant speculator sees no sort of likeness to a bear in the
stars, nor anything at all resembling a giant in the neighbourhood of
Orion. The most eccentric modern fancy which can detect what shapes it
will in clouds, is unable to find any likeness to human or animal forms
in the stars, and yet we call a great many of the stars by the names of
men and beasts and gods. Some resemblance to terrestrial things, it is
true, everyone can behold in the heavens. Corona, for example, is like a
crown, or, as the Australian black fellows know, it is like a boomerang,
and we can understand why they give it the name of that curious curved
missile. The Milky Way, again, does resemble a path in the sky; our
English ancestors called it Watling Street--the path of the Watlings,
mythical giants--and Bushmen in Africa and Red Men in North America name
it the 'ashen path,' or 'the path of souls.' The ashes of the path, of
course, are supposed to be hot and glowing, not dead and black like the
ash-paths of modern running-grounds. Other and more recent names for
certain constellations are also intelligible. In Homer's time the Greeks
had two names for the Great Bear; they called it the Bear, or the Wain:
and a certain fanciful likeness to a wain may be made out, though no
resemblance to a bear is manifest. In the United States the same
constellation is popularly styled the Dipper, and every one may observe
the likeness to a dipper or toddy-ladle.

But these resemblances take us only a little way towards appellations. We
know that we derive many of the names straight from the Greek; but whence
did the Greeks get them? Some, it is said, from the Chaldaeans; but