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The Mussel

John Hill (c.1714–1775) was an eighteenth-century British botanist and natural philosopher. In 1754, he published an astronomy dictionary entitled Urania, or A Compleat View of the Heavens. (This is a year before Samuel Johnson's celebrated A Dictionary of the English Language.) Over the course of 650 pages he discussed or defined numerous astronomical terms, often including pithy comments about the subject matter. He also invented 15 new constellations of his own, each modestly introduced as a "constellation offered to the astronomical world". Given that he was offering up celestial eels and earthworms and slugs, it's not entirely certain that he was serious. Pinna Marina is one of John Hill’s creations and is located mostly in Scutum. It may coincide with another of Hill's constellations, Anguilla, but the positioning of the later figure is uncertain. According to Hill, Pinna Marina is "formed of a cluster of very conspicuous stars near the left foot of Antinous....It is of small extent, and it takes in but a few stars, but they are large, conspicuous, and, as has been already observed, remote from all other constellations."