SkyEye

The Earthworm

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. Lumbricus is one of John Hill’s creations. He describes it as "a small constellation, and it comprehends only a few stars, but these are in so remarkable a place that it is very fit they should be ascertained within the lineaments of some figure. The creature, that is made to answer this purpose, is drawn in a crawling posture, a little convoluted, and running up from the Litte Dog to Gemini....The conspicuous stars, in the constellation Lumbricus, are nine, and they are of very different sizes, though none of them of the larger magnitudes."