telling a tale of their being seal-hunters who missed their way home; but they distinctly held that the stars were in old times men and animals, before they went up into the sky.[1] So the North American Indians had more than superficial meaning in calling the Pleiades the Dancers, and the morning-star the Day-bringer; for among them stories are told like that of the Iowas, of the star that an Indian had long gazed upon in childhood, and who came down and talked with him when he was once out hunting, weary and luckless, and led him to a place where there was much game.[2] The Kasia of Bengal declare that the stars were once men: they climbed to the top of a tree (of course the great heaven-tree of the mythology of so many lands), but others below cut the trunk and left them up there in the branches.[3] With such savage conceptions as guides, the original meaning in the familiar classic personification of stars can scarcely be doubted. The explicit doctrine of the animation of stars is to be traced through past centuries, and down to our own. Origen declares that the stars are animate and rational, moved with such order and reason as it would be absurd to say irrational creatures could fulfil. Pamphilius, in his apology for this Father, lays it down that whereas some have held the luminaries of heaven to be animate and rational creatures, while others have held them mere spiritless and senseless bodies, no one may call another a heretic for holding either view, for there is no open tradition on the subject, and even ecclesiastics have thought diversely of it.[4] It is enough to mention here the well-known mediæval doctrine of star-souls and star-angels, so intimately mixed up with the delusions of astrology. In our own time the theory of the animating souls of stars finds still here and there an advocate, and De Maistre,
