History
Johannes Hevelius defined the constellation in the 17th century because he wanted to fill the open gap between the constellations Ursa Major and Auriga. He supposedly named it Lynx because of its faintness: only the lynx-eyed (or those of good sight) would have been able to recognise it.
Read more about this topic: Lynx (constellation)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)