dancing.' There is perhaps no stranger name The 

 than our Gaelic Crannarain (though Griog- ^J eiad " 

 lachan or Meanmnach is more common), i.e., 

 the baker's peel or shovel, from an old legend 

 about a Baker and his wife and six daughters, 

 itself again related to a singular Cuckoo myth. 



But an end to this long excerpting from 

 * starry notes ' ! In a later chapter, too, I pro- 

 pose to write of * Winter Stars,' and the 

 Great Bear, and Orion, and the Milky Way — 

 and I must take warning in time to condense 

 better and write ' more soothly ' as Chaucer 

 has it. So, now, let me end with a quotation 

 from Mr. D'Arcy Thompson's preface to his 

 Greek Birds, to which I have alluded in a 

 footnote. 'As the White Doves came from 

 Babylon or the Meleagrian Birds from the 

 further Nile, so over the sea and the islands 

 came Eastern legends and Eastern names. 

 And our Aryan studies must not blind us to 

 the presence in an Aryan tongue of these 

 immigrants from Semitic and Egyptian speech, 

 or from the nameless and forgotten language 

 that was spoken by the gods.' 



Food for thought there, and in many of the 

 other alluded-to clues of old forgotten faiths 

 and peoples, for the Pleiad-Month ! 



What ages, what rise and fall of kingdoms 

 and great empires, since the Arabian shepherd 



275 



