That once eminent student in the mathematics and the celestial sciences, Henry Coley, who, as Merlin junior continued Lily's Almanac, and published also his own yearly _Nuncius Sydereus_, or Starry Messenger,—the said Coley, whose portrait in a flowing wig and embroidered band, most unlike to Merlin, has made his Ephemeris in request among the Graingerites,—he tells us it is from considering the nature of the planets, together with their daily configurations, and the mixture of their rays or beams of light and heat, that astrologers deduce their judgement of what may _probably_, not _positively_ happen: for Nature, he observes, works very abstrusely; and one person may be able to make a better discovery than another, whence arise diversities of opinion too often about the same thing. The physician knows that the same portion of either single or compound simples will not work upon all patients alike; so neither can the like portion and power of qualities stir up, or work always the same; but may sometimes receive either _intention_ or _remission_ according to the disposed aptness of the subject, the elements or elementary bodies not always admitting of their powers alike, or when they be overswayed by more potent and prevalent operations. For universal and particular causes do many times differ so as the one hinders the operation of the other; and Nature may sometimes be so abstrusely shut up, that what we see not may overpower and work beyond what we see. Thus were these professors of a pseudo-science always provided with an excuse, however grossly their predictions might be contradicted by the event. It is a beautiful specimen of the ambiguity of the art that the same aspect threatened a hump-back, or the loss of an eye; and that the same horoscope which prognosticated a crown and sceptre, was held to be equally accomplished if the child were born to a fool's-cap, a bauble, and a suit of motley. “The right worshipful, and of singular learning in all sciences, Sir Thomas Smith, the flower in his time of the University of Cambridge,” and to whom, more than to any other individual, both Universities are beholden; for when Parliament, in its blind zeal for ultra-reformation, had placed the Colleges, as well as the Religious Houses, at the King's disposal, he, through Queen Katharine Par, prevailed upon Henry to preserve them, instead of dividing them also among the great court cormorants; and he it was who reserved for them the third part of their rents in corn, making that a law which had always been his practice when he was Provost of Eton:—This Sir Thomas used, as his grateful pupil Richard Eden has recorded, to call astrology _ingeniosissimam artem mentiendi_,—the most ingenious art of lying.