exceptional feature and the nose
(Sagittarius) bent towards the left ear. A person born when the Sun is
in any of the latter degrees of Taurus, say the twenty-fifth degree,
will have a small, sharp, weak chin, curved up towards Gemini, the two
vertical lines on the upper lip."(4) The time was when science went out
of its way to prove that such statements were untrue; but that time is
past, and such writers are usually classed among those energetic but
misguided persons who are unable to distinguish between logic and
sophistry.

In England, from the time of Elizabeth to the reign of William and Mary,
judicial astrology was at its height. After the great London fire, in
1666, a committee of the House of Commons publicly summoned the famous
astrologer, Lilly, to come before Parliament and report to them on his
alleged prediction of the calamity that had befallen the city. Lilly,
for some reason best known to himself, denied having made such a
prediction, being, as he explained, "more interested in determining
affairs of much more importance to the future welfare of the country."
Some of the explanations of his interpretations will suffice to
show their absurdities, which, however, were by no means regarded as
absurdities at that time, for Lilly was one of the greatest astrologers
of his day. He said that in 1588 a prophecy had been printed in Greek
characters which foretold exactly the troubles of England between the
years 1641. and 1660. "And after him shall come a dreadful dead man,"
ran the prophecy, "and with him a royal G of the best blood in the
world, and he shall have the crown and shall set England on the right
way and put out all heresies." His interpretation of this was that,
"Monkery being extinguished above eighty or ninety years, and the Lord
General's name being Monk, is the dead man. The royal G or C (it is
gamma in the Greek, intending C in the Latin, being the third letter in
the alphabet) is Charles II., who, for his extraction, may be said to be
of the best blood of the world."(5)

This may be taken as a fair sample of Lilly's interpretations of
astrological prophesies, but many of his own writings, while somewhat
more definite and direct, are still left sufficiently vague to allow
his skilful interpretations to set right an apparent mistake. One of
his famous documents was "The Starry Messenger," a little pamphlet
purporting to explain the phenomenon of a "strange apparition of three
suns" that we