688 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE MEANING OF PICTURED SPHERES. 



By J. C. HOUZEAU. 



WHEN we take up a treatise on astronomy and come to the 

 description of the constellations, we meet an amazing sys- 

 tem of nomenclature. The celestial sphere is represented as cov- 

 ered with fictitious figures of all sorts of personages and objects, 

 to which the stars are referred. There are heroes, like Hercules 

 and Perseus ; women, like Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and the Virgin ; 

 a giant, Orion ; simple workingmen, such as a charioteer and a 

 herdsman; a considerable number of animals, including two 

 bears, a lion, a bull, a serpent, a crab, and a scorpion ; monsters, 

 like the dragon and the Capricorn ; and various inanimate objects, 

 from a crown and a harp to a river. No other science offers so 

 singular a system of nomenclature, so far outside of scientific 

 conceptions. In botany, zoology, and topography, objects have 

 distinctive names. We are universally accustomed to apply to 

 the things we speak of designations that belong to them ; but a 

 system by itself, a figurative nomenclature, is applied to the 

 groups of stars. This is a unique exception in the sciences. It is 

 furthermore remarkable in this exception that it has held with 

 all peoples who have made or begun a description of the sky. 

 While the work may have been executed in isolation and in 

 ignorance of the way followed by other nations, and the figures 

 employed may be distinct, original, and inspired by the charac- 

 ter of the people, the system of figuration has been the same. 



There must evidently exist a cause of a general nature which 

 has directed the thought of man in this always identical direc- 

 tion. There must be some feature in the aspect of the constella- 

 tions different from those of other collections of natural objects 

 and conditions which provoke a distinct work of the intelligence. 

 This feature and these conditions we are concerned to find. It 

 would have been no more strange to apply a figurative nomen- 

 clature to topographical groups than to the stars. Persons who 

 first arrive in previously uninhabited countries are obliged to 

 give names to the landmarks of the region which they will occupy ; 

 they have to distinguish the rivers and their affluents, the mount- 

 ains and rocks. A chain of mountains might, perhaps, be more 

 justly compared to a dragon than the file of stars that bears that 

 name. The first mountain of the range might be the head of the 

 monster, the second the neck, and the last the tail, while the lesser 

 chains might be called the flippers or feet. This possibility is 

 not to be rejected, for traces of a similar application are to be 

 found in Formosa. The Chinese have, according to Ritter, put 



