14 Centaur; 



of the poisoned arrows of Hercules struck Chiron, who, 

 although immortal, would not live any longer, and gave his 

 immortality to Prometheus. Zeus placed Chiron among the 

 stars as Sagittarius. 



Ixion — Zeus (Jupiter) created a phantom resembling Hera, 

 and by it Ixion became the father of a Centaur. 



While Pirithous was celebrating his marriage with Hippo- 

 damia, the intoxicated Centaur Eurytion, or Eurytus, carried 

 her off, and this act occasioned the celebrated fight, in which 

 the Centaurs were defeated. 



"THE CENTAURS, or BULL KILLEES. 



" Those strange beings, half man, half horse, which we see 

 represented in works of art, are the Centaurs. Such creatures 

 seem impossible in nature, yet the ancient Greeks firmly 

 believed in their existence. It is not hard to discover what 

 gave them the idea of such monsters. 



"Centaur, does not mean 'half man, half horse,' but *bull 

 killer ;' a being half a horse would more properly be called 

 a Hippocentaur. In the oldest Greek stories about the 

 Centaurs they are spoken of as a savage race, inhabiting 

 the woods and mountains of Thessaly, a country famous for 

 wild bulls, which the natives hunted on horseback. 



" Now, there was a time when the horse, now so useful in 

 most parts of the world, was a wild, untamed animal ; and 

 the people who first brought it to subjection, broke it in and 

 rode upon it, would be looked upon as wonderful beings by 

 the men of those tribes, who had perhaps never seen a horse. 

 To them the horse and his rider would appear to be one 

 animal, especially when seen at a distance, and from the back 

 view, so that the horse's head was not visible. Indeed, this 

 really occurred when the Spaniards invaded Mexico. The 

 natives had never seen a horse in their lives, and when they 

 saw the extraordinary animal leaping and bounding, with an 

 armed figure apparantly growing out of its back, they were 

 terrified at the monster, and it was not till they had seen 

 the Spaniards dismount from their horses that they would 

 believe they were separate from their steeds, and only 

 men after all ! " — Chatterbox. 



