The names may have had many origins whose signification is lost, owing to their being misunderstood. Thus figurative language may have been interpreted as real, as when a conjunction is called a marriage; a disappearance, death; and a reappearance, a resurrection; and then stories must be invented to fit these words; or the stars that have in one country given notice of certain events lose the meaning of their names when these are used elsewhere; as when a boat painted near the stars that accompany an inundation, becomes the ship Argo; or when, to represent the wind, the bird's wing is drawn; or those stars that mark a season are associated with the bird of passage, the insect or the animal that appears at that time: such as these would soon lose their original signification. The celestial sphere, therefore, as we now possess it, is not simply a collection of unmeaning names, associated with a group of stars in no way connected with them, which have been imposed at various epochs by capricious imagination, but in most instances, if not in all, they embody a history, which, if we could trace it, would probably lead us to astronomical facts, indicating the where and the when of their first introduction; and the story of their changes, so far as we can trace it, gives us some clue to the mental characteristics or astronomical progress of the people who introduced the alterations. We shall find, indeed, in a subsequent chapter, that many of our conclusions as to the birth and growth of astronomy are derived from considerations connected with the various constellations, more especially those of the zodiac. With regard to the date when and the country where the constellations of the sphere were invented, we will here give what evidence we possess, independent of the origin of the zodiac. In the first place it seems capable of certain proof that they were not invented by the Greeks, from whom we have received them, but adopted from an older source, and it is possible to give limits to the date of introduction among them. Newton, who attributes its introduction to Musaeus, a contemporary of Chiron, remarks, that it must have been settled _after_ the expedition of the Argonauts, and _before_ the destruction of Troy; because the Greeks gave to the constellation names that were derived from their history and fables, and devoted several to celebrate the memory of the famous adventurers known as the Argonauts, and they would certainly have dedicated some to the heroes of Troy, if the siege of that place had happened at the time. We remark that at this time astronomy was in too infant a state in Greece for them to have fixed with so much accuracy the position of the stars, and that we have in this a proof they must have borrowed their knowledge from older cultivators of the science.