[130] Mr. Loftie has kindly shown me a green mouse containing the throne-name of Thothmes III. The animals thus used as substitutes for scarabs were also sacred, as the fish, rhinoceros, fly, all represented in Mr. Loftie's collection. See his _Essay of Scarabs_, p. 27. It may be admitted that, in a country where Cats were gods, the religion of the Mouse must have been struggling and oppressed. [Illustration: {Two examples of scarab substitutes}] [131] Strabo, xiii. 604. [132] Eustathius on _Iliad_, i. 39. [133] _A Strange and True Relation of the Prodigious Multitude of Mice_, 1670. [134] _Journal of Philol._, xvii. p. 96. [135] Leviticus xi. 29. [136] Samuel i. 5, 6. [137] _Zool. Myth._, ii. 68. [138] _Mélusine_, N.S. i. [139] _De Iside et Osiride_, lxxvi. [140] This hypothesis does not maintain that totemism prevailed in Greece during historic times. Though Plutarch mentions a Carian γένος, the Ioxidæ, of Attic descent, which revered asparagus, it is probable that genuine totemism had died out of Greece many hundreds of years before even Homer's time. But this view is not inconsistent with the existence of survivals in religion and ritual. [141] Rolland, _Faune populaire_. _STAR MYTHS._ Artemus Ward used to say that, while there were many things in the science of astronomy hard to be understood, there was one fact which entirely puzzled him. He could partly perceive how we 'weigh the sun,' and ascertain the component elements of the heavenly bodies, by the aid of _spectrum_ analysis. 'But what beats me about the stars,' he observed plaintively, 'is how we come to know their names.' This question, or rather the somewhat similar question, 'How did the constellations come by their very peculiar names?' has puzzled Professor Pritchard and other astronomers more serious than Artemus Ward. Why is a group of stars called the _Bear_, or the _Swan_, or the _Twins_, or named after the _Pleiades_, the fair daughters of the Giant Atlas?[142] These are difficulties that meet even children when they examine a 'celestial globe.' There they find the figure of a bear, traced out with lines in the intervals between the stars of the constellations, while a very imposing giant is so drawn that Orion's belt just fits his waist. But when he comes to look at the heavens, the infant speculator sees no sort of likeness to a bear in the stars, nor anything at all resembling a giant in the neighbourhood of Orion. The most eccentric modern fancy which can detect what shapes it will in clouds, is unable to find any likeness to human or animal forms in the stars, and yet we call a great many of the stars by the names of men and beasts and gods. Some resemblance to terrestrial things, it is true, every one can behold in the heavens. _Corona_, for example, is like a crown, or, as the Australian black fellows know, it is like a boomerang, and we can understand why they give it the name of that curious curved missile. The _Milky Way_, again, does resemble