192 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Vou. IIT. 
Australian savages, is still lingering in Britain under the popular tradi- 
tions as to the good King Arthur. It is worthy of note that the name of 
this king meant in Egypt a hill, (Bunsen’s Egypt, L, 465.) 
The era when the Pleiades left their impress on the calendars and 
traditions of nations, must, says Haliburton, in Mature, Vol. 25. 100, be 
very remote, so much so that such researches are like investigations into 
the fossils that tell of organisms that lived in a world and breathed an 
atmosphere different from our own. He found a tradition on the African 
Gold Coast, that the Pleiades are young women, six of whom are very 
beautiful, but the seventh is so plain that she conceals herself from sight. 
Some tribes of the Australians dance in honour of the Pleiades, 
because “they are good to the black fellows.” The negroes too, say 
“these stars are good to the darkies.” The natives of both North and 
South America regard the Pleiades as beneficent stars, and dance in 
their honour. M. Madler, of Dorpat, in 1846 developed the theory that 
Alcyoné, the lucida of the cluster, is the centre of gravity of the solar 
system, the luminous hinge around which our sun and the planets move 
through space. The theory had been mooted by Wright in 1750, and 
Lucretius had some fanciful notion as to our system revolving around a 
common centre: Lib. 1, de rerum Natura. “The theory of Madler, that 
Alcyoné, the brightest of the group is the central sun of the universe is 
most interesting,” says Haliburton, on account of the fact that such was 
the actual belief of early ages. “The ancients in very remote ages 
undoubtedly believed that it was the centre of the universe, and that 
Paradise the primeval home of our race and the abode of the Deity, and 
of the spirits of the dead, was in the Pleiades, traces of which ideas we 
even find among savages.” 
With the Pleiades two sacred birds were connected. In Samoa there 
is a sacred bird called Manu-lii, the bird of the Pleiades. The Hindoos 
believed that Brahma came from an egg. The Greeks had similar 
traditions ; Castor and Pollux sprang from an egg. So also Semiramis, 
and she was brooded over by a peliad or dove. 
From Britain to Japan these stars are popularly known as the “ Hen 
and Her Chickens,” and the “Hen-Coop.” In Mexico the Kingfisher was 
a sacred bird ; so with the Greeks it was called the Halcyon, the bird of 
Alcyoné or Paradise; and the Halcyon days were the summer days at 
the end of autumn, which we should now render heavenly days. Mr. 
Haliburton found that among the Brahmins of Tyroloc, the name of 
November was Kartica, the month of the Pleiades. In Polynesia there 
was a year regulated by the rising of the Pleiades at the sunset, and their 
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