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The Tortoise

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. Testudo is one of John Hill’s creations and is located in Cetus. Hill writes, "it is not a very large one, but for the space it occupies in the heavens, it comprehends a considerable number of stars....it seems crawling over the tail, and toward the back of the Whale....The conspicuous stars in the constellation Testudo are twenty-six."