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The Shellfish

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. Gryphites is one of John Hill’s creations. According to Hill, it is "formed out of certain conspicuous stars near the sign Hercules in the northern hemisphere....The Gryphites consists principally of eleven stars, and these almost all very conspicuous; they are so well disposed also in the figure, that there is not a constellation in the heavens better marked, or more easily distinguished."