That constellation ‘y-cleped the Bere,’ how profoundly it has impressed the imagination of all peoples. In every age, in every country, our kindred on lonely lands, on lonely seas, from caverns and camp-fires and great towers, have watched it ‘incline its ravishing courses’ about the Mountain of the North, ‘coveting not’ to drown its white fires in the polar seas. Here, however, it is strange to note the universality of the Ursine image with the Greeks and Romans and the nations of the South, and the universality with the Teutonic peoples of designations such as the Wain and the Plough. It was not till the Age of Learning set in among the Northern peoples that the classic term came into common use. Thus in a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon manual of astronomy the writer, in adopting the Greek Arctos (still used occasionally instead of the Bear), adds ‘which untaught men call Carleswæn,’ that is Charles’s Wain, the Waggon. A puzzling problem is why a designation which primarily arose from an association of the early Greeks concerning Arkas, their imaginary racial ancestor, with Kallisto his mother, who had been changed into a great bear in the heavens, should also suggest itself to other peoples, to races so remote in all ways as the North American Indians. Yet before the white man had visited the tribes of North America the red men called the constellation by names signifying a bear. The historian Bancroft has proved that alike among the Algonquins of the Atlantic and of the Mississippi, among the Eastern Narragansett nations and among the nations of the Illinois, the Bear was the accepted token. Boötes, the Great Bear, the Little Dipper or Ursa Minor, these great constellations, with their splendid beacons Arcturus, the Triones or the Seven Hounds of the North, and the Pole Star-- “By them, on the deep, The Achaians gathered where to sail their ships”-- and in like fashion all the races of man since Time was have ‘gathered’ the confusing ways of night on all lonely seas and in all lonely lands.