West of Orion, beginning near Rigel, is seen the constellation Eridanus, the River Po. Its stars are interesting for their plainly streaming tendency rather than for their individual peculiarities. Rising slightly from the neighborhood of Rigel, the stream runs in a graceful curve under Taurus, and continues westward until it meets Cetus, where it turns downward toward the horizon, and then sweeps back eastward again, disappearing behind the southern horizon below Orion and Lepus. It has no large star visible in northern latitudes, but in the southern hemisphere it contains one of the brightest stars in the sky, Achernar, the “End of the River.” All of the ancients saw a river in this part of the sky, a fact which does not surprise the observer when he has once noted the arrangement of the stars of Eridanus. Its stars are so numerous that the old uranographers seem to have grown weary of attaching letters to them; or rather, perhaps, the alphabet was too short to answer the demand, for no less than nine of them, beginning from the one thus lettered in Chart V, are called Tau (τ), as τ¹, τ², τ³, etc. (For the origin of the association of Eridanus with the River Po, and with the story of Phaeton, see _Astronomy with the Naked Eye_). The constellation Lepus, the Hare, below Orion, and marking the place where Eridanus turns finally to flow into the far south, is noteworthy only for its groupings of stars. It contains one star too faint to be seen with the naked eye near the western border of the constellation, below and to the right of the little group under Rigel, in Chart V, which is so intensely crimson that Hind likened its appearance to a _blood drop_.