Abstract
IT is a singular circumstance that the oldest-known mode of determining the seasons and directing the recurrent operations of human industry, should also have been the most widely diffused. Nor was this an obvious one. It regarded directly neither of the two great luminaries, which, as they move, might almost be said visibly to pay out a golden cable of time; but turned, instead, to a comparatively inconspicuous, though beautiful and eminently interesting, group of stars. The periodical shiftings in the sky of the sun and moon force themselves upon the dullest apprehension; one must, however, be already something of an astronomer to take any close heed of stellar configurations. Yet all over the world, in the northern and southern hemispheres, amongst Polynesian and Australian savages, as well as under the sway of Egyptian, Peruvian, Mexican, early Hellenic, and Indian civilisations, traces are found of a primitive calendar regulated by the risings and settings of the so called “Seven Stars.”1
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CLERKE, A. The Pleiades . Nature 33, 561–564 (1886). https://doi.org/10.1038/033561a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/033561a0