I. p. 31.
It was in this way that the constellation of the Great Bear
received its name. The Greek word arktos, answering to the
Sanskrit riksha, meant originally any bright object, and was
applied to the bear--for what reason it would not be easy to
state--and to that constellation which was most conspicuous in
the latitude of the early home of the Aryans. When the Greeks
had long forgotten why these stars were called arktoi, they
symbolized them as a Great Bear fixed in the sky. So that, as
Max Muller observes, "the name of the Arctic regions rests on
a misunderstanding of a name framed thousands of years ago in
Central Asia, and the surprise with which many a thoughtful
observer has looked at these seven bright stars, wondering why
they were ever called the Bear, is removed by a reference to
the early annals of human speech." Among the Algonquins the
sun-god Michabo was represented as a hare, his name being
compounded of michi, "great," and wabos, "a hare"; yet wabos
also meant "white," so that the god was doubtless originally
called simply "the Great White One." The same naive process
has made bears of the Arkadians, whose name, like that of the
Lykians, merely signified that they were "children of light";
and the metamorphosis of Kallisto, mother of Arkas, into a
bear, and of Lykaon into a wolf, rests apparently upon no
other foundation than an erroneous etymology.
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