These casters of figures may bee numbred among the cousening witches, whose practise is above their reach, their purpose to gaine, their knowledge stolne from poets, their art uncerteine & full of vanitie, more plainly derided in the scriptures, than any other follie. And thereupon many other trifling vanities are rooted and grounded; as physiognomie, palmestrie, interpreting of dreames, monsters, auguries, &c: the professors whereof confesse this to be the necessarie key to open the knowledge of all their secrets. For these fellowes erect a figure of the heavens, by the exposition whereof (togither with the conjectures of similitudes and signes) they seeke to find out the meaning of the significators, attributing to them the ends of all things, contrarie to truth, reason, and divinitie: their rules being so inconstant, that few writers agree in the verie principles therof. For the _Rabbins_, the old and new writers, and the verie best philosophers dissent in the cheefe grounds thereof, differing in the proprietie of the houses, whereout they wring the foretelling of things to come, contending even about the number of spheres, being not yet resolved how to erect the beginnings and endes of the houses: for _Ptolomie_ maketh them after one sort, _Campanus_ after another, &c. ♦The vaine and trifling trickes of figure-casters.♦ And as _Alpetragus_ thinketh, that there be in the heavens diverse movings as yet to men unknowne, so doo others affirme (not without probabilitie) that there maie be starres and bodies, to whome these movings maie accord, which cannot be seene, either through their exceeding highnes, or that hitherto are not tried with anie observation of the art. The true motion of _Mars_ is not yet perceived, neither is it possible to find out the true entring of the sunne into the equinoctiall points. It is not denied, that the astronomers themselves have received their light, and their verie art from poets, without whose fables the twelve signes and the northerlie and southerlie figures had never ascended into heaven. And yet (as _C. Agrippa_ saith) astrologers doo live, cousen men, and game by these fables; whiles the poets, which are the inventors of them, doo live in beggerie. ♦_Johan. Montiregius in epistola ad Blanchimē:_♦ ♦_& Gulielmus de sancto Clodoald._ _Rabbi Levi._ _C. Agrip. in lib. de vanit. scient._ _Archelaus._ _Cassander._ _Eudoxus, &c._♦