THE MEANING OF PICTURED SPHERES. 691 



and had two gates, at the two places where it intersects the zodiac. 

 The souls entered the world by the gate of the Twins (which cor- 

 responds with the sign Cancer), and left it to return to the gods 

 by the gate of Sagittarius (sign of Capricorn). It is a little re- 

 markable that some of the American nations also called the milky 

 way the highway of souls ; * but it does not appear so singular 

 upon reflection. The milky way certainly resembles a road in its 

 shape. Let us now recollect that a large number of people con- 

 sign the souls of their ancestors to the sky ; hence the idea might 

 easily have occurred frequently. There has also been a fortuitous 

 and unconscious agreement among nations to give the name of 

 the Bear to the most brilliant constellation in the neighborhood 

 of the north pole. The primitive Sanskrit name of this constella- 

 tion, according to Prof. Max Muller, meant " chariot," and this 

 was the original image, which survives among some of our people 

 to the present. But as the same word, rihsha, also designates a 

 bear, there has sometimes been confusion, and the image of a bear 

 was placed by the Greeks on the classic sphere. A bear was also 

 represented by the principal North American Indian nations in 

 the quadrilateral of this constellation. Only, these nations, who 

 were familiar with the bear, did not include in the same constella- 

 tion the three stars of what we call the tail, because the bear has 

 only a very short tail, and this inclusion would have made it 

 monstrous ; so they fancied them three hunters pursuing the 

 bear. 



Now, is there anything extraordinary in the coincidence of like 

 similitudes in the Old and New Worlds ? "We do not think there 

 is. The bear is a polar animal. The constellation is large, and 

 demands a large symbol. Facts prove this, for the constellation 

 was a reindeer with the Eskimos, an elk with the Indians of Puget 

 Sound, and an elephant with the Hindoos. The fortuitous coin- 

 cidence of names in two different centers does not, therefore, seem 

 hard to explain. It only implies that there is a resemblance with 

 the adopted image in the aspect of the constellation. We should 

 also consider that, within the limits of a certain compass of ideas, 

 the number of objects to which it is possible to recur is restricted, 

 and two peoples may be led by chance to select the same symbol 

 for the same group of stars. This is visibly the case with the 

 constellation Cancer, which is represented in Japan by another 

 crustacean, the many-fingered limulus. 



I shall not insist upon the coincidence which La Condamine 

 thought he had found, respecting the constellation Taurus, among 

 some of the Indians of the Amazon. It is now understood that 

 the term by which these Indians designated the Hyades did not 

 mean a bull's jaw, but a tapir's. The examples of identity or of 



* J. F. Labitau, " Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains," 4to, 1724, vol. i, p. 406. 



