Astronomy of the Australian Aborigines. 
By the Rey. Peter MacPuerson, M.A. 
[Read before the Royal Society of N.S. W., 6 July, 1881.] 
Ir is not my purpose merely to give a list of aboriginal names of 
stars and constellations. Looking over the materials to hand, and 
arrangements of the stars ! ere are, indeed, evidences of 
imagination in tracing resemblances between objects on the 
and the outline formed by certain stars. Thus we have the 
Northern Crown forming the curve of a boomerang; a group of 
stars in the Lion (as it appears to me) exhibiting the shape of an 
eagle's claw; the Crow, asa kangaroo; the Coal-sack, as the body of 
an emu ; the stars composing the Dolphin, asa great fish ; and the 
streams of stars in Berenice’s Hair, as a tree with three principal 
brane es, c 
nection was made between certuin stars and the seasons of 
year. Thus, the Pleiades (Larnankurrk) are a group of young 
females playing to a corroboree party of young men ( ulkunbulla), 
e- 
K 
represented by the belt and dirk of Orion. The red star Ald 
baran, Gellarlec, or rose-crested Cockatoo, is an old man keep- 
