Before leaving the Scorpion, however, I must call attention to one or two points which this remarkable constellation seems to establish. First, it is clear that in its case real resemblance suggested the association of a group of stars with a familiar object. Since this resemblance remains, we infer that the group of stars presents now an appearance closely resembling that which it presented four or five thousand years ago. And as there is no special reason why the stars of the Scorpion more than those of other constellations should retain their lustre unchanged, we gain a certain probability for the belief that _all_ the constellations are now very much as they were when first named. Indeed, it so happens that the region occupied by the Scorpion is perhaps that part of the heavens where changes would on the whole most probably occur, the region of the Milky Way crossed by the Scorpion being exceptionally irregular. We may note also that the part of the earth where the observers lived who called this constellation the Scorpion must have been one where the reptile is well known, a conclusion which seems to dispose of the belief that the first astronomers lived in high latitudes.
Let us, now, however, take some of the more difficult cases. We cannot do better, perhaps, than take at the very outset the Great Bear, a constellation of which many astronomers have asserted that it no longer presents and probably never did present the slightest resemblance to a bear.
I would lay down, in the first place, the hypothesis that the stars in the region of the heavens now occupied by the Great Bear _must_ have reminded the earliest observers of a large, heavily-bodied, small-headed, short-eared, and short-tailed creature, such as either a bear or a hippopotamus. Next, it may be taken for granted that the creature of which they were thus reminded was one with which they were familiar; and as we have already seen that the inventors of the oldest constellations cannot have lived in very high latitudes, we may conclude with great probability that the bear imagined in the heavens was not the Polar bear, but the bear from which the first shepherd astronomers had to defend their herds and flocks,--the Syrian bear, as it is commonly called, though the species inhabited also the greater part of Asia Minor in former times. The Indians may be supposed to have seen the grizzly bear, not the smaller black bear, in the heavens. The features to be looked for, then, among the stars, are those common to the bears of comparatively low latitudes--not those of the polar bear.