What a world of legend, what a greater world of poetry and old romance, centres in this little group of stars. ‘The meeting-place in the skies of mythology and science,’ as they have been called by one of our chief astronomers. From time immemorial this remote starry cluster has been associated with festivals and solemnities, with auguries and destinies. On November 17, the day of the midnight culmination of the Pleiades, the great Festival of Isis was begun at Busiris: in ancient Persia, on that day, no petition was presented in vain to the King of Kings: and on the first of the month the midnight rites of our own ancestral Druids were connected with the rising of the Pleiades. To-day the South Sea Islanders of the Society and Tonga Isles divide the year by their seaward rising and setting. The _Matarii i nia_, or season of the ‘Pleiades Above,’ begins when in the evening this stellar group appears on the horizon, and while they remain above it: the _Matarii i raro_, or season of the ‘Pleiades Below,’ begins when after sunset they are no longer visible, and endures till once again they appear above the horizon. The most spiritual and the most barbaric races are at one in considering them centres of the divine energy. The Hindûs imaged them as Flame, typical of Agni, God of Fire, the Creative Energy: the several Persian words, from the ancient _Perv_ or the _Parur_ of Hafiz or the _Parwin_ of Omar Khayyam--derive from _Peru_, a word signifying ‘The Begetters’: and we know that the Greeks oriented to them or to their _lucida_ not only the first great temple of Athenê on the Acropolis, but its successor four hundred years later, the Hecatompedon of 1150 B.C., and seven hundred years later the Parthenon on the same side. [The great shrine of Dionysos at Athens, the still earlier Asclepieion at Epidaurus, and the temple of Poseidon at Sunium, looked towards the Pleiades at their setting.] But far removed from these are the Malays and Pacific islanders, who more vaguely and crudely revere ‘the central fires,’ and even so primitive and remote a people as the Abipones of the Paraguay River country worship them as their Great Spirit--_Groaperikie_, or Grandfather--and chant hymns of joy to this Pleiad-Allfather when, after the vernal Equinox, the mysterious cluster once more hangs visible in the northern sky.