logy is nothing more than the fallacious guess of superstitious
men, who have founded a science on uncertain things and are deceived by
it: so think nearly all the wise; as such it is ridiculed by some most
noble philosophers; Christian theologians reject it, and it is condemned
by sacred councils of the Church. Yet you, whose office it is to
dissuade others from these vanities, oppressed, or rather blinded by I
know not what distress of mind, flee to this as to a sacred augur, and
as if there were no God in Israel, that you send to inquire of the god
of Ekron."

(29) H. Morley: The Life of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, London,
1856, Vol. II, p. 138.

In spite of the opposition of the Church astrology held its own; many of
the universities at the end of the fifteenth century published almanacs,
usually known as "Prognosticons," and the practice was continued far
into the sixteenth century. I show you here an illustration. Rabelais,
you may remember, when physician to the Hotel Dieu in Lyons, published
almanacs for the years 1533, 1535, 1541, 1546. In the title-page he
called himself "Doctor of Medicine and Professor of Astrology," and they
continued to be printed under his name until 1556. In the preparation
of these he must have had his tongue in his cheek, as in his famous
"Pantagrueline Prognostication," in which, to satisfy the curiosity of
all good companions, he had turned over all the archives of the heavens,
calculated the quadratures of the moon, hooked out all that has ever
been thought by all the Astrophils, Hypernephilists, Anemophylakes,
Uranopets and Ombrophori, and felt on every point with Empedocles.(30)

(30) Pantagrueline Prognostication, Rabelais, W. F. Smith's
translation, 1893, Vol. II, p. 460.

Even physicians of the most distinguished reputation practised judicial
astrology. Jerome Cardan was not above earning money by casting
horoscopes, and on this subject he wrote one of his most popular books
(De Supplemento Almanach, etc., 1543), in which astronomy and
astrology are mixed in the truly mediaeval fashion. He gives in it some
sixty-seven nativities, remarkable for the events they foretell, with an
exposition. One of the accusations brought against him was that he had
"attempted to subject to the stars the Lord of the stars and cast our
Saviour's horoscope."(31) Cardan professed to have abandoned a practice
looked upon with disfavor both by the Church and by the universities,