Note.
As these pages are passing through the press, a letter from Mr. Maunder appears in The Observatory for August 1913 on "The Origin of the Constellations," and this should be consulted by anyone interested in the subject. Mr. Maunder points out that Ptolemy gives us much more precise information than Aratus regarding the southern limits of the ancient constellations, and that the changes which he says he ventured to make in their traditional forms are extremely insignificant.
Mr. Maunder further observes that the celestial equator of Aratus cannot give any clue to the origin of the constellations (as R. Brown suggested), but only to the date of the work from which Aratus copied, when some astronomer had drawn the equator through the constellations. A slight alteration of the text, Mr. Maunder says, would give a correct equator for the date B.C. 1000.
See also Mr. and Mrs. Maunder's article in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for March 1904.
Proctor's "Origin of the Constellation Figures" is in his book Myths and Marvels of Astronomy.
