Milton in his Paradise Lost thus refers to Andromeda:
Andromeda far off Atlantic seas
Beyond the horizon.
Kingsley's Andromeda is beautifully descriptive of the constellation.
Pluche[1] accounts for the names of the constellations Perseus, Andromeda, and Cepheus in the following ingenius way:
It was an ordinary turn of the Hebrew and Phoenician languages to say that a city or country was the daughter of the rocks, deserts, rivers, or mountains that surrounded her or that were enclosed within her walls. Thus Jerusalem is often called "the daughter of Sion," that is, the daughter of drought or daughter of the barren hills contained within its compass. Palestine originally was nothing more than a long maritime coast consisting of rocks and a sandy flat shore. It was proper to speak of this long coast as the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiope, Cepha signifying a stone. If you would say in Phœnician, a long coast or a long chain or ridge, you would call it Andromeda. Palestine would have been destroyed had it not been for the assistance of the barks and pilots that voyaged to Pharos and Sais to convey provisions. Strabo informs us that the Phœnicians were accustomed to paint the figure of a horse upon the stern of their barks, but there was beside the winged horse (the emblem of navigation) a horseman bearing a peculiar symbol, and, as it were, the arms of the city of Sais. This was the Medusa's head. Furthermore, a bark in the vulgar tongue was called Perseus, which means a runner or horseman. This then according to Pluche was the meaning of the fabled sacrifice of Andromeda:—Exposed to a cruel monster on the rocks of Joppa, in Syria, Andromeda (or the coast towns of Palestine) owed her deliverance to a flying rider, Perseus
- ↑ History of the Heavens, by Abbé Pluche
