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The Limpet

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. Patella is one of John Hill’s creations. According to Hill, "The Patella is a small constellation, and contains only a few stars....The constellations, between which it is situated, are Ophiucus, the Serpent, and the Eagle....The stars of which it is composed are easily counted, for, they are only four, but they are all large and beautiful ones; three of these which are disposed almost in a line, mark the bottom of the shell, and one which stands single over them, the top." Marcin Odlanicki Poszobutt (1728–1810) reused these stars in his constellation Taurus Poniatovii.