300 
SCOUTING FOR GIRLS 
fanciful association with the namesake, rather than for 
resemblance to it. 
The Pole-star is really the most important of the stars 
in our sky ; it marks the north at all times ; all the other 
stars seem to swing around it once in twenty-four hours. 
It is in the end of the Little Bear’s tail ; this constellation 
is sometimes called the Little Dipper. But the Pole-star, 
or Polaris, is not a very bright one, and it would be 
hard to identify but for the help of the Pointers of the 
Big Dipper. 
The outside stars (Alpha and Beta) of the Dipper 
point nearly to Polaris, at a distance equal to five times 
the space that separates these two stars of the Dipper's 
outer side. 
Indian names for the Pole-star are the “Home Star," 
and “The Star That Never Moves," and the Big Dipper 
they call the “Broken Back." 
The great Bear is also to be remembered as the hour- 
hand of the woodman’s clock. It goes once around the 
North Star in about twenty-four hours, the same way as 
the sun, and for the same reason — that it is the earth 
that is going and leaving them behind. 
The time in going around is not exactly twenty-four 
hours, so that the position of the Pointers varies with 
the seasons, but, as a rule, this for woodcraft purposes 
is near enough. The bowl of the Dipper swings four- 
fifths of the width of its own opening in one hour. If 
it went a quarter of the circle, that would mean you had 
slept a quarter of a day, or six hours. 
Every fifteen days the stars seem to be an hour earlier ; 
in three months they gain one-fourth of the circle, and 
in a year gain the whole circle. 
According to Flammarion, there are about seven thou- 
sand stars visible to the naked eye, and of these twenty 
are stars of the first magnitude. Fourteen of them are 
