of births, had led them early to attribute great
importance to all the teratologic facts which were there produced. They
claimed that an experience of 470,000 years of observations, all
concordant, fully justified their system, and that in nothing was the
influence of the stars marked in a more indubitable manner than in the
fatal law which determined the destiny of each individual according to
the state of the sky at the moment when he came into the world. Cicero,
by the very terms which he uses to refute the Chaldeans, shows that the
result of these ideas was to consider all infirmities and monstrosities
that new-born infants exhibited as the inevitable and irremediable
consequence of the action of these astral positions. This being
granted, the observation of similar monstrosities gave, as it were, a
reflection of the state of the sky; on which depended all terrestrial
things; consequently, one might read in them the future with as much
certainty as in the stars themselves. For this reason the greatest
possible importance was attached to the teratologic auguries which
occupy so much space in the fragments of the great treatise on
terrestrial presages which have up to the present time been published."

The rendering into English of the account of 62 teratologic cases in
the human subject with the prophetic meanings attached to them by
Chaldean diviners, after the translation of Opport, is given as follows
by Ballantyne, some of the words being untranslatable:--

"When a woman gives birth to an infant--

(1) that has the ears of a lion, there will be a powerful king in the
country;

(2) that wants the right ear, the days of the master (king) will be
prolonged (reach old age);

(3) that wants both ears, there will be mourning in the country, and
the country will be lessened (diminished);

(4) whose right ear is small, the house of the man (in whose house the
birth took place) will be destroyed;

(5) whose ears are both small, the house of the man will be built of
bricks;

(6) whose right ear is mudissu tehaat (monstrous), there will be an
androgyne in the house of the new-born

(7) whose ears are both mudissu (deformed), the country will perish and
the enemy rejoice;

(8) whose right ear is round, there will be an androgyne in the house
of the new-born;

(9) whose right ear has a wound below, and tur re ut of the man, the
house will be estroyed;

(10) that has two ears on the right side and none on the