122 COSMOS. 



The artifical grouping of the stars into constellations, 

 which arose incidentally during the lapse of ages the fre- 

 quently inconvenient extent and indefinite outline the com- 

 plicated designations of individual stars in the different con- 

 stellations the various alphabets which have been required 

 to distinguish them, as in Argo together with the tasteless 

 blending of mythical personages with the sober prose of philo- 

 sophical 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 haz- 

 ardous in respect to the southern hemisphere, where Scorpio, 

 Sagittarius, Centaurus, Argo, and Eridanus alone possess any 

 poetic interest.* 



The heavens of the fixed stars (orbis inerrans of Apule- 

 ius), and the inappropriate expression of fixed stars (astro, 

 fixa of Manilius), reminds us, as we have already observed 

 in the introduction to the Astrognosy,f of the connection, or, 

 rather, confusion of the ideas of insertion, and of absolute im- 

 mobility or fixity. When Aristotle calls the non-wandering 

 celestial bodies (dnXavrj darpa) riveted (ivdede^iva), when 

 Ptolemy designates them as ingrafted (TrpoanefivKorec;), these 

 terms refer specially to the idea entertained by Anaximenes 

 of the crystalline sphere of heaven. The apparent motion 

 of all the fixed stars from east to west, while their relative 

 distances remained unchanged, had given rise to this hypoth- 

 esis. " The fixed stars (drrAavr/ aarpa) belong to the higher 

 and more distant regions, in which they are riveted, like nails, 



dischcn Thierkreises, 1841, s. 9, 16, 23. " The passages quoted from 

 Amorakoscha and Ramayana," says the latter writer, "admit of un- 

 doubted interpretation, and speak of the zodiac in the clearest terms ; 

 but if these works were composed before the knowledge of the Greek 

 signs of the zodiac could have reached India, these passages ought to 

 be carefully examined for the purpose of ascertaining whether they 

 may not be comparatively modern interpolations." 



* Compare Buttman, in Berlin Astron. Jahrbuchfur 1822, s. 93, Ol- 

 bers 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 Hem- 

 uphere, in the Memoirs of the Astr. Soc., vol. xii., p. 201-224 (with a 

 very exact distribution of the southern stars from the first to the fourth 

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

 on the introduction of his domestic cat and of a reaper (Messier!), Ol- 

 bers complains that in order " to find space in the firmament for Kirg 

 Frederic's glory, Andromeda must lay her right arm in a different place 

 from that which it had occupied for 3000 years !" 



t Vide supra, p. 26-28, and note. 



