But for that matter all the figures in the sky are disappointing. The people who named the constellations called them lions, and fishes, and horses, and hunters, and they thought they could see a dolphin, a snake, a dragon, a crow, a crab, a bull, a ram, a swan, and other things. But nowadays we cannot see those creatures. We can see the stars plainly enough, and they do make groups, but they do not look like animals. I was greatly disappointed when I was told this; but I soon got over it, because new wonders are always coming on. I think the only honest thing to do is to tell you right at the start that you cannot see these creatures very well. You will spoil your pleasure unless you take these resemblances good-naturedly and with a light heart. And you will also spoil your pleasure if you scold the ancients for naming the constellations badly. Nobody in the world would change those old names now. There is too much pleasure in them. Besides, I doubt if we could do much better. I believe those old folks were better observers than we. And I believe they had a lighter fancy.
Let us, too, be fanciful for once. I have asked my friend, Mrs. Thomas, to draw her notion of some of these famous creatures of the sky. You can draw your idea of them too, and it is pleasant to compare drawings with friends. There is only one way to see anything like a Great Bear. You have to imagine the Dipper upside down and make the handle of the Dipper serve for the Bear's tail. What a funny bear to drag a long tail on the ground! Miss Martin says he looks more like a chubby hobby-horse. You will have to make the bowl of the Dipper into hind legs and use all the other stars, somehow, to make a big, clumsy, four-legged animal. And what a monster he is! He measures twenty-five degrees from the tip of his nose to the root of his tail. Yes, all those miscellaneous faint stars you see near the Big Dipper belong to the Great Bear.
Orion fighting the Bull. Above are Orion's two dogs
The Little Bear, the Queen in her chair, the Twins and the Archer
How the Great Bear looked to the people who named it thousands of years ago, we probably shall never know. They left no books or drawings, so far as I know. But in every dictionary and book on astronomy you can find these bears and other animals drawn so carefully and beautifully that it seems as if they must be in the sky, and we must be too dull to see them. It is not so. Look at the pictures in this book and, you will see that the stars do not outline the animals. Many of them come at the wrong places. And so it is with all the costly books and charts and planispheres. It is all very interesting, but it isn't true. It's just fancy. And when you once understand that it isn't true, you will begin to enjoy the fancy. Many a smile you will have, and sometimes a good laugh. For instance, the English children call the Dipper "Charles's wain" or "the wagon." And the Romans called it "the plough." They thought of those seven stars as oxen drawing a plough.
Well, that's enough about the two Bears. I want to tell you about the other three constellations you can nearly always see. These are the Chair, the Charioteer, and Perseus (pronounced per'soos).
The Chair is the easiest to find, because it is like a very bad W, and it is always directly opposite the big Dipper, with the Pole star half way between the two constellations. There are five stars in the W, and to make the W into a Chair you must add a fainter star which helps to make the square bottom of the chair. But what a crazy piece of furniture! I have seen several ways of drawing it, but none of them makes a comfortable chair. I should either fall over backward, or else the back of the chair would prod me in the small of my back. The correct name of this constellation is Cassiopeia's Chair.