THE STARS.

Colonist, Volume LVI, Issue 13456, 30 April 1914, Page 6

THE STARS.

It is only five thousand years since some silent-, watcher in the valley of the Euphrates let his fancy play with images and called the Crab the Crab, and the Lyre tho Lyre. And beyond everything, even if on© continues to suppose that the moon is made of green cheese, and' that night's seeming candles are but pin-points in an azure paper dome, daily illuminated by a 1 dark-light lantern, or that Apollo verit | ably embraces Aurora amid the roses !of dayspring, it is indispensable, says ! the "Westminster Gazette," to learn I tho greater stars by name; that naming topaz Beteljeux (pronounced, alas! ox cessivoly like beotle-juico), almondblossom Aldebaran, fiery Antares, silvery Spica, Canopue, Fumalhaul, Nigel, Gapella. They are beautiful words. They stand for constant, far, and everfamiliar delights. We have done poorly by them in English. The Dipper is ■hot so worthy a term as the Chariot, Septentrione's, the Plough, Charles's Wain, or the Great Bear. And the Champion Sprinter comes, on the face of it, from America.. It is a star of infinite strenuosity—though how many trillions of leagues of space it has covered since Washington died- nothing should induce bno to ascertain. Give a star a bright-sounding, romantic, fantastic name, and it will never, never desert you. Call ..the stars after your 'sweethearts, your sorrows, your hopes, or your dead: they will enrich life and befriend the darkness. Steadfast in ■light,'they will not fail man's strange, | groping, solitary mind.