"The prognostics which the Chaldeans claimed to draw from monstrous births in man and the animals are worthy of forming a class by themselves, insomuch the more as it is the part of their divinatory science with which, up to the present time, we are best acquainted. The development that their astrology had given to 'genethliaque,' or the art of horoscopes 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 left, the gods will bring about a stable reign, the country will flourish, and it will be a land of repose; (11) whose ears are both closed, sa a au;