But the primitive asterism—the Seven Rishis of the old Hindus, the Septem Triones of the Latins, the Arktos of Homer—included no more than seven stars. And this is important as regards the origin of the name. For it is impossible to suppose a likeness to any animal suggested by the more restricted group. Scarcely the acquiescent fancy of Polonius could find it ‘backed like a weasel,’ or ‘very like a whale.’ Yet a weasel or a whale would match the figure equally well with, or better than, a bear. Probably the growing sense of incongruity between the name and the object it signified may have induced the attempt to soften it down by gathering a number of additional stars into a group presenting a distant resemblance to a four-legged monster. The name of the Bear, this initial difficulty notwithstanding, is prehistoric and quasi-universal. It was traditional amongst the American-Indian tribes, who, however, sensible of the absurdity of attributing a conspicuous protruding tail to an animal almost destitute of such an appendage, turned the three stars composing it into three pursuing hunters. No such difficulty, however, presented itself to the Aztecs. They recognised in the seven ‘Arctic’ stars the image of a Scorpion,[34] and named them accordingly. No Bear seems to have bestridden their sky. Footnote 34: Bollaert, _Memoirs Anthrop. Society_, vol. i. p. 216. The same constellation figures, under a divinified aspect, with the title _Otawa_, in the great Finnish epic, the ‘Kalevala.’ Now, although there is no certainty as to the original meaning of this word, which has no longer a current application to any terrestrial object, it is impossible not to be struck with its resemblance to the Iroquois term _Okowari_, signifying ‘bear,’ both zoologically and astronomically.[35] The inference seems justified that _Otawa_ held the same two meanings, and that the Finns knew the great northern constellation by the name of the old Teutonic king of beasts. Footnote 35: Lafitau, _op. cit._ p. 236. It was (as we have seen) similarly designated on the banks of the Euphrates; and a celestial she-bear, doubtfully referred to in the Rig-Veda, becomes the starting-point of an explanatory legend in the Râmâyana.[36] Thus, circling the globe from the valley of the Ganges to the great lakes of the New World, we find ourselves confronted with the same sign in the northern skies, the relic of some primeval association of ideas, long since extinct. Footnote 36: Gubernatis, _Zoological Mythology_, vol. ii. p. 109. Extinct even in Homer’s time. For the myth of Callisto (first recorded in a lost work by Hesiod) was a subsequent invention—an effect, not a cause—a mere embroidery of Hellenic fancy over a linguistic fact, the true origin of which was lost in the mists of antiquity.