To Compostella. The popular German name for the Milky Way is still _Jakobsstrasse_, while the three stars of Orion’s belt are designated, in the same connexion, _Jakobsstab_, staff of St James. The point of most significance about Homer’s scanty astronomical notions is that they were of home growth. They are precisely such as would arise among a people in an incipient stage of civilisation, simple, direct, and childlike in their mode of regarding natural phenomena, yet incapable of founding upon them any close or connected reasoning. Of Oriental mysticism there is not a vestige. No occult influences rain from the sky. Not so much as a square inch of foundation is laid for the astrological superstructure. It is true that Sirius is a ‘baleful star’; but it is in the sense of being a harbinger of hot weather. Possibly, or probably, it is regarded as a concomitant cause, no less than as a sign of the August droughts; indeed the _post hoc_ and the _propter hoc_ were, in those ages, not easily separable; the effect, however, in any case, was purely physical, and so unfit to become the starting-point of a superstition. The Homeric names of the stars, too, betray common reminiscences rather than foreign intercourse. They are all either native, or naturalised on Greek soil. The transplanted fable of Orion has taken root and flourished there. The cosmopolitan Bear is known by her familiar Greek name. Boötes is a Greek husbandman, variously identified with Arcas, son of Callisto, or with Icarus, the luckless mandatory of Dionysus. The Pleiades and the Hyades are intelligibly designated in Greek. The former word is usually derived from _pleîn_, to sail; the heliacal rising of the ‘tangled’ stars in the middle of May having served, from the time of Hesiod, to mark the opening of the season safe for navigation, and their cosmical setting, at the end of October, its close. But this etymology was most likely an after-thought. Long before rules for navigating the Ægean came to be formulated, the ‘sailing-stars’ must have been designated by name amongst the Achæan tribes. Besides, Homer is ignorant of any such association. Now in Arabic the Pleiades are called _Eth Thuraiyâ_, from _therwa_, copious, abundant. The meaning conveyed is that of many gathered into a small space; and it is quite similar to that of the Biblical _kîmah_, a near connexion of the Assyrian _kimtu_, family.[48] Analogy, then, almost irresistibly points to the interpretation of Pleiades by the Greek _pleiones_, many, or _pleîos_, full; giving to the term, in either case, the obvious signification of a ‘cluster.’ Footnote 48: R. Brown, _Phainomena of Aratus_, p. 9; Delitzsch, _The Hebrew Language_, p. 69.