Another form of augury was the examination of the marks on the carapax of a tortoise; thus the Martial King in 146 consulted, and found unfavourable, such marks--this was before attacking the last Shang emperor; and it was only at the earnest instigation of his chief henchman (afterwards vassal king and founder of Ts'i) that he was prevailed upon to proceed. Possibly he borrowed Eastern ideas from this founder of Ts'i too. Later on, the Martial King's younger brother, the Duke of Chou, consulted the oracle along with the same Ts'i adviser: this was done before the three ancestral altars of their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, in order to ascertain if the Emperor (_i.e._ the Martial King) would recover from a sickness. In 1109 the Martial King's son and successor sent one of his uncles or near relatives to examine the site of modern Ho-nan Fu, with a view to transferring the metropolis thither, and, the oracles being favourable, the Nine Tripods were removed to that place, and it was afterwards called the "Eastern Metropolis" (the original or western capital was not moved for over 300 years after that). It was at the same time foretold that there would be thirty more reigns, of 700 years in all: this was "Heaven's decree." On the other hand, when the Duke of Chou died during a tempest, the young Emperor was advised not to consult the oracles as to what the storm signified, because his uncle's virtues were so manifest that Heaven itself had, by the agency of a tempest, spontaneously announced the fact. Astrology was another form of soothsaying. In 780 B.C. the imperial astrologer (one of those two men, by the way, whom erroneous tradition 1000 years later confused with Lao-tsz) foretold the rise of Ts'i, Tsin, Ts'u, and Ts'in, upon the ruins of the imperial power; in 773 the same astrologer repeated the prophecy to the imperial prince then recently enfeoffed by his relative the Emperor in the state of CHÊNG. In 705 the imperial astrologer, when passing through the orthodox state of CH'ÊN, foretold from the diagrams that a scion of the CH'ÊN house would obtain the throne of Ts'i (which actually took place when the _maire du palais,_ to the horror of Confucius, assassinated the last legitimate duke in 481 B.C.); this particular prophecy is doubly interesting, because the diagrams from the Changes, thus cited in detail in Confucius' history, correspond exactly with the diagrams of the Book of Changes as we have it now, since Confucius manipulated it--proof that no change has taken place in this part of the text at least.