In the same way the Egyptians and others characterised the different days of the year by the stars which first appeared in the evening—as we shall see more particularly with reference to the Pleiades—and in this way certain stars came to be associated in their calendar with variations of temperature and operations of agriculture. They soon took for the cause what was originally but the sign, and thus they came to talk of moist stars, whose rising brought rain, and arid stars, which brought drought. Some made certain plants to grow, and others had influence over animals.
In the case of Egypt, no other so great event could occur as that which the Dog-Star foretold, and its appearance was consequently made the commencement of the year. Instead, therefore, of painting it as a simple star, in which case it would be indistinguishable from others, they gave it shape according to its function and name. When they wished to signify that it opened the year, it was represented as a porter bearing keys, or else they gave it two heads, one of an old man, to represent the passing year, the other of a younger, to denote the succeeding year. When they would represent it as giving warning of the inundation they painted it as a dog. To illustrate what they were to do when it appeared, Anubis had in his arms a stew-pot, wings to his feet, a large feather under his arm, and two reptiles behind him, a tortoise and a duck.
There is also in the celestial sphere a constellation called the Little Dog and Procyon; the latter name has an obvious meaning, as appearing before the Dog-Star.
We cannot follow any farther the various constellations of the northern sphere, nor of the southern. The zodiacal constellations we must reserve for the present, while we conclude by referring to some of the changes in form and position that some of the above-mentioned have undergone in the course of their various representations.
These changes are sometimes very curious, as, for example, in a coloured chart, printed at Paris in 1650, we have the Charioteer drawn in the costume of Adam, with his knees on the Milky Way, and turning his back to the public; the she-goat appears to be climbing over his neck, and two little she-goats seem to be running towards their mother. Cassiopeia is more like King Solomon than a woman. Compare this with the Phenomena of Aratus, published 1559, where Cassiopeia is represented sitting on an oak chair with a ducal back, holding the holy palm in her left hand, while the Coachman, "Erichthon," is in the costume of a minion of Henry the Third of France. Now compare the Cassiopeia of the Greeks with that drawn in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or the Coachman of the same periods, and we can easily see the fancies of the painters have been one of the most fertile sources of change. They seem, too, to have had the fancy in the middle ages to draw them all hideous and turning their backs. Compare, for instance, the two pictures of Andromeda and Hercules, as given below, where those on one side are as heavy and gross as the others are artistic and pretty. Unfortunately for the truth of Andromeda's beauty, as depicted in these designs, she was supposed to be a negress, being the daughter of the Ethiopians, Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Not one of the drawings indicates this; indeed they all take after their local beauties.
In Flamsteed's chart, as drawn above, the Coachman is a female; and instead of the she-goat being on the back, she holds it in her arms. No one, indeed, from any of the figures of this constellation would ever dream it was intended to represent a coachman.
One more fundamental cause of changes has been the confusion of names derived by one nation from another, these having sometimes followed their signification, but at others being translated phonetically. Thus the Latins, in deriving names from the Greek Ἄρκτος, have partly translated it by Ursa, and partly have copied it in the form Arcticus. So also with reference to the three stars in the head of the Bull, called by the Greeks Hyades. The Romans thought it was derived from ὗες, sows, so they called them suculæ, or little sows; whereas the original name was derived from ὕειν, to rain, and signified stars whose appearance indicated the approach of the rainy season.
More curious still is the transformation of the Pearl of the Northern Crown (Margarita Coronæ) in a saint—S. Marguerite.
The names may have had many origins whose signification is lost, owing to their being misunderstood. Thus figurative language may have been interpreted as real, as when a conjunction is called a marriage; a disappearance, death; and a reappearance, a resurrection; and then stories must be invented to fit these words; or the stars that have in one country given notice of certain events lose the meaning of their names when these are used elsewhere; as when a boat painted near the stars that accompany an inundation, becomes the ship Argo; or when, to represent the wind, the bird's wing is drawn; or those stars that mark a season are associated with the bird of passage, the insect or the animal that appears at that time: such as these would soon lose their original signification.
The celestial sphere, therefore, as we now possess it, is not simply a collection of unmeaning names, associated with a group of stars in no way connected with them, which have been imposed at various epochs by capricious imagination, but in most instances, if not in all, they embody a history, which, if we could trace it, would probably lead us to astronomical facts, indicating the where and the when of their first introduction; and the story of their changes, so far as we can trace it, gives us some clue to the mental characteristics or astronomical progress of the people who introduced the alterations.
We shall find, indeed, in a subsequent chapter, that many of our conclusions as to the birth and growth of astronomy are derived from considerations connected with the various constellations, more especially those of the zodiac.
With regard to the date when and the country where the constellations of the sphere were invented, we will here give what evidence we possess, independent of the origin of the zodiac.
In the first place it seems capable of certain proof that they were not invented by the Greeks, from whom we have received them, but adopted from an older source, and it is possible to give limits to the date of introduction among them.
Newton, who attributes its introduction to Musæus, a contemporary of Chiron, remarks, that it must have been settled after the expedition of the Argonauts, and before the destruction of Troy; because the Greeks gave to the constellation names that were derived from their history and fables, and devoted several to celebrate the memory of the famous adventurers known as the Argonauts, and they would certainly have dedicated some to the heroes of Troy, if the siege of that place had happened at the time. We remark that at this time astronomy was in too infant a state in Greece for them to have fixed with so much accuracy the position of the stars, and that we have in this a proof they must have borrowed their knowledge from older cultivators of the science.
The various statements we meet with about the invention of the sphere may be equally well interpreted of its introduction only into Greece. Such, for instance, as that Eudoxus first constructed it in the thirteenth or fourteenth century B.C., or that by Clement of Alexandria, that Chiron was the originator.
The oldest direct account of the names of the constellations and their component stars is that of Hesiod, who cites by name in his Works and Days the Pleiades, Arcturus, Orion, and Sirius. He lived, according to Herodotus, about 884 years before Christ.
The knowledge of all the constellations did not