The most uneducated eye, when raised to the starry heavens on a clear night, fixes here and there upon groups of stars: in the north, Cassiopeia, the Great Bear, the Pleiades--below the Equator, the Southern Cross--must at all times have impressed those who beheld them with a certain sense of unity.

Thus the idea of a "constellation" is formed; and this once done, the mind naturally progresses in the same direction, and little by little the whole sky is mapped out into certain portions or districts to which names are given--names taken from some resemblance, real or fancied, between the shapes of the several groups and objects familiar to the early observers.

This branch of practical astronomy is termed "uranography" by moderns; its utility is very considerable; thus and thus only can we particularize the individual stars of which we wish to speak; thus and thus only can we retain in our memory the general arrangement of the stars and their positions relatively to each other.
There is reason to believe that in the early Babylonian astronomy the subject of uranography occupied a prominent place.

The Chaldaean astronomers not only seized on and named those natural groups which force themselves upon the eye, but artificially arranged the whole heavens into a certain number of constellations or asterisms.

The very system of uranography which maintains itself to the present day on our celestial globes and maps, and which is still acknowledged--albeit under protest--in the nomenclature of scientific astronomers, came in all probability from this source, reaching us from the Arabians, who took it from the Greeks who derived it from the Babylonians.