This argument had been worked out to the writer's satisfaction when he chanced to light on Mr. Max Müller's explanation of the name of the _Great Bear_. We have explained that name as only one out of countless similar appellations which men of every race give to the stars. These names, again, we have accounted for as the result of savage philosophy, which takes no great distinction between man and the things in the world, and looks on stars, beasts, birds, fishes, flowers, and trees as men and women in disguise. Mr. Müller's theory is based on philological considerations. He thinks that the name of the _Great Bear_ is the result of a mistake as to the meaning of words. There was in Sanskrit, he says,[155] a root _ark_, or _arch_, meaning 'to be bright.' She-stars are called _riksha_, that is, bright ones, in the Veda. 'The constellations here called the Rikshas, in the sense of the "bright ones," would be homonymous in Sanskrit with the Bears. Remember also that, apparently without rhyme or reason, the same constellation is called by Greeks and Romans the Bear.... There is not the shadow of a likeness with a bear. You will now perceive the influence of words on thought, or the spontaneous growth of mythology. The name _Riksha_ was applied to the bear in the sense of the bright fuscous animal, and in that sense it became most popular in the later Sanskrit, and in Greek and Latin. The same name, "in the sense of the bright ones," had been applied by the Vedic poets to the stars in general, and more particularly to that constellation which in the northern parts of India was the most prominent. The etymological meaning, "the bright stars," was forgotten; the popular meaning of Riksha (bear) was known to every one. And thus it happened that, when the Greeks had left their central home and settled in Europe, they retained the name of Arktos for the same unchanging stars; but, not knowing why those stars had originally received that name, they ceased to speak of them as _arktoí_, or many bears, and spoke of them as the Bear.'