But this condition is as necessary by day as by night. How can we determine in which direction lies the south, if the sun be hidden from our gaze by an uniformly opaque atmosphere, and if objects, lit up by a diffuse light, project no shadow at any time of the day?
Endeavour to group together the stars which more particularly strike your gaze; and be careful, in these groupings, to define every fantastic figure which is suggested by your vivid imagination. Undoubtedly, our earliest ancestors, the "world's gray forefathers," proceeded in this manner, in their anxiety to lay hold of some definite guiding-marks in yonder ocean of sparkling atoms. And to study a science by its history is to follow up its successive development.
The Great and the Little Bear.
Observe yonder very remarkable group of seven stars; nearly all are of the same splendour, and they are so arranged as to figure an antique chariot, provided with a somewhat curved axle pole.
Observe it carefully. And not far from this group you will detect another, by no means so conspicuous, but exactly resembling it in form. This second chariot is turned in an inverse direction, and the stars composing it, with three exceptions, are much less brilliant.
Here, then, are two groups of stars, clearly distinguished by their configuration—two constellations, for such is the scientific name given to all the stellar groups.
Fig. 2.—The Great Bear and Little Bear.
It has been the fortune of the first of these two groups to strike the eye of the most indifferent observer from the remotest antiquity; and its likeness to a quadriga early procured it the name of a car or chariot. For those Christians who pleased themselves in studding the sky with Biblical personages, it is David's Chariot. This species of apotheosis was borrowed from the Pagans. They placed in the skies their divinities, their demigods, their heroes, and the principal facts and stories of their mythology. For the Greeks and Romans the "Chariot of David" was the female of the Bear, an ursa, or ἀρκτὸς. Whence came this transfiguration? Listen to the fanciful old myth.