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The Tooth Shell

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. Dentalium is one of John Hill’s creations and he describes it "a small constellation, but, for its extent, it contains a considerable number of stars. The constellations, between which it is placed, are Aquarius, the Dolphin, Antinous, and Capricorn....The conspicuous stars in the Dentalium are fifteen, and they are disposed, as it were, in four clusters at some distance from one another."