lly, and these will have their bearing on our
subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical
conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a
given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will happen to him, but
only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will
find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external
nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
not quite reliable--judging from the many blunders made--or else its
professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past
masters in it.

[Illustration: Horoscope of Annie Besant.]

It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
London, "within the sound of Bow Bells," when three-quarters of my
blood and all my heart are Irish. My dear mother was of purest Irish
descent, and my father was Irish on his mother's side, though belonging
to the Devonshire Woods on his father's. The Woods were yeomen of the
sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent
fashion. Of late years they seem to have developed more in the
direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became
Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline's battles against her most
religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no
niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke
of Kent's royal daughter. Since then they have given England a Lord
Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord
Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways
in the service of their country. But I feel playfully inclined to
grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his
Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin,
education. For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish
nature dear to my heart. Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask
a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:
"Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner,
and then any one will tell you the way. And it's there you'll see the
place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be
on yer.