ANNUAL ADDRESS. 
13 
inscriptions, that they were familiar at an early period in the 
very country from whence Abraham came out. 
This inference gives, to an astronomer, a special interest to 
not a few Scripture passages. We know that Abraham and 
Moses, David and Amos, must have looked upwards to the same 
shining eyes as those that look down upon us, and it seems 
to bring those ancient worthies nearer to us, if we realise that 
those stars were associated to them with the same imagined 
frescoes as they are to us. To them, as to us, Ophiuchus 
strangled the Snake and trampled on the Scorpion ; the 
Kneeler crushed the Dragon’s head ; the Virgin held the Ear 
of Corn ; and the giant Orion attacked the Bull. 
We find evidence of the acquaintance of the Hebrews with 
the ancient constellations in Joseph’s dream, wherein the 
“ eleven stars ” evidently signify eleven out of the zodiacal 
twelve ; the twelfth, traditionally Taurus the leader, represent- 
ing Joseph himself. We learn from St. Stephen that the 
worship of the golden calf in the wilderness, was “ star- 
worship ” ; the Israelites choosing the form of a calf, presumably 
because it was the form of Taurus : — 
“ The white bull with golden horns that opens the year,” 
to quote Virgil. It was the stellar bull, the leader of the host 
of heaven, that they were worshipping as Him Who had led 
them out of the land of Egypt. 
There is a definite and direct reference to one of the con- 
stellation forms in the twenty-sixth chapter of the book of Job. 
There J ob says of God that : — 
“ By His spirit He hath garnished the heavens. 
His hand has formed the crooked serpent.” 
Here the parallelism of Hebrew’ poetry obliges us to take 
“ hath formed the crooked serpent ” as a restatement of “ hath 
garnished” (that is adorned) “the heavens”; the great con- 
stellation of the writhing Dragon, emphatically a “ crooked 
serpent,” placed at the very crown of the heavens, and 
encircling its two northern poles, being poetically put for all 
the constellations of the sky. 
The ancient constellations have a very high archaeological 
value, and this in two directions. First, they preserve to us 
a record of the earliest scientific work of man. Next, they 
throw an important light on the origin of myth. 
For it is clear that the constellation figures were associated 
with the stars upon a deliberate, and, in the strictest sense, 
a scientific plan. The science v T as real if primitive. The 
