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The Limpet

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. Scarabaeus is one of John Hill’s creations and is located at the junction of Ophiuchus, Scorpius and Libra. Hill says that "It is a very small constellation, but in proportion to the entent that it occupies in the heavens, it contains a sufficient number of stars, and these, in general, very conspicuous; they have been used to be accounted among the unformed stars of the other constellations, but this is so uncertain, and confused a method of speaking of them, that it is certianly better to have them, like the stars of those constellations, arranged under the lines of some figure, and much more familiar and perspicuous; for instance, to call one of them the upper or the lower star in the horn of the Beetle, than by any number of unformed ones of such a constellation, though with the addition of a letter from Bayer."