August 16, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



199 



About the year 750 b. c. (the probable 

 date of the Book of Job) all these stars 

 culminated at altitudes between 5° and 16° 

 when viewed from the latitude of Judea; 

 but now, owing to precessional change, they 

 can only be seen in a like striking manner 

 from a latitude .about 12° further south. 



The words of Dante have unquestionably 

 originated the wonderful net of poetic 

 fancy that has been woven about the aster- 

 ism, which we now call Crux. 



To the right hand I turned, and fixed my mind 

 On the other pole attentive, where I saw 

 Pour stars ne'er seen before save by the ken 

 Of our first parents — Heaven of their rays 

 Seemed joyous. O thou northern site! bereft 

 Indeed, and widowed, since of these deprived. 



All the commentators agree that Dante 

 here referred to the stars of the Southern 

 Cross. 



Had Dante any imperfect knowledge of 

 the existence of these stars, any tradition 

 of their visibility from European latitudes 

 in remote centuries, so that he might 

 poetically term them the stars of our first 

 parents ? 



Ptolemy catalogues them as 31, 32, 33 

 and 34 Centauri, and they are clearly 

 marked on the Borgian globe described by 

 Assemanus in 1790. This globe was con- 

 structed by an Arabian in Egypt : it bears 

 the date 622 Hegira, corresponding with 

 A. D. 1225, and it is possible that Dante 

 may have seen it. 



Amerigo Vespucci, as he sailed in trop- 

 ical seas, apparently recognized in what we 

 now call Crux the four luminous stars of 

 Dante; for in 1501 he claimed to be the 

 first European to have looked upon the 

 stars of our first parents. His fellow- 

 voyager, Andrea Corsali, wrote about the 

 same time to Giuliano di Medici describing 

 "the marvelous cross, the most glorious of 

 all the celestial signs." 



Thus much mysticism and romance have 



been woven about this constellation, with 

 the result that exaggerated notions of its 

 brilliancy have been formed, and to most 

 persons its first appearance, when viewed 

 in southern latitudes, is disappointing. 



To those, however, who view it at upper 

 culmination for the first time from a lati- 

 tude a little south of the Canary Islands, 

 and who at the same time make uncon- 

 sciously a mental allowance for the ab- 

 sorption of light to which one is accus- 

 tomed in the less clear skies of northern 

 Europe, the sight of the upright cross, 

 standing as if fixed to the horizon, is a 

 most impressive one. I at least found it 

 so on my first voyage to the Cape of Good 

 Hope. But how much more strongly must 

 it have appealed to the mystic and super- 

 stitious minds of the early navigators as 

 they entered the unexplored seas of the 

 northern tropic! To them it must have 

 appeared the revered image of the cross 

 pointing the way on their southward 

 course— a symbol and sign of hope and 

 faith on their entry to the unknown. 



The first general knowledge of the 

 brighter stars of the southern hemisphere 

 we owe to Frederick de Hautman, who 

 commanded a fleet sent by the Dutch Gov- 

 ernment in 1595 to the Par East for the 

 purpose of exploring Japan. Hautman 

 was wrecked and taken prisoner at Su- 

 matra, and whilst there he studied the 

 language of the natives and made observa- 

 tions of the positions and magnitudes of 

 the fixed stars of the southern hemisphere." 

 Our distinguished countryman Halley 

 visited St. Helena in 1677 for the purpose 

 of cataloguing the stars of the southern 

 hemisphere. He selected a station now 

 marked Halley 's Mount on the admiralty 



"The resulting catalogue of 304 stars is printed 

 as an appendix to Hautman's " Vocabulary of the 

 ilalay Language," published at Amsterdam in 

 1603. 



