164 COSMOS. 



The artificial grouping of the stars into constellations which 

 arose incidentally during the lapse of ages the frequently in- 

 convenient extent and indefinite outline the complicated 

 designations of individual stars in the different constellations 

 the various alphabets which have been required to distinguish 

 them, as in Argo together with the tasteless blending of mythi- 

 cal personages with the sober prose ofphilosophipal instruments, 

 chemical furnaces, and pendulum clocks, in the southern 

 hemisphere have led to many propositions for mapping the 

 heavens in new divisions, without the aid of imaginary 

 figures. This undertaking appears least hazardous in respect 

 to the southern hemisphere, where Scorpio, Sagittarius, Cen- 

 taurus, Argo, and Eridanus alone possess any poetic interest. 31 



The heavens of the fixed stars (orlis inerrans of Apuleius) 

 and the inappropriate expression of fixed stars, (astro, fixa of 

 Manilius) remind us, as we have already observed in the in- 

 troduction to the Astrognosy, 32 of the connexion, or rather 

 confusion of the ideas of insertion, and of absolute immo- 

 bility or fixity. When Aristotle calls the non-wandering 

 celestial bodies (dirXavrj aWpa) rivetted (evSeSe/nei/a), when Pto- 

 lemy designates them as engrafted (7rpo<T7re(vKoYes), these 

 terms refer specially to the idea entertained by Anaximenes 



31 Compare Buttman, in Berlin astron. Jahrbuch fur 1822, 

 s. 93, Olbers on the more recent constellations in Schumacher's 

 Jahrbuch fur 1840, s. 283-251, and Sir John Herschel, 

 Revision and Rearrangement of the Constellations, with special 

 reference to those of the Southern Hemisphere, in the Memoirs 

 of the Astr. Soc., vol. xii. pp. 201-224, (with a very exact 

 distribution of the southern stars from the 1st to the 4th 

 magnitude). On the occasion of Lalande's formal discussion 

 with Bode on the introduction of his domestic cat and of a 

 reaper (Messier!) Olbers complains that in order " to find space 

 in the firmament for King Frederick's glory, Andromeda 

 must lay her right arm in a different place from that which it 

 had occupied for 3000 years !" 



32 Vide supra, pp. 30-31, and note. 





