medical practitioner in India.” This passage tends to confirm, what indeed no judicious person can doubt, that the application of astrology to medicine, though it was soon perverted, and debased till it became a mere craft, originated in actual observations of the connection between certain bodily affections, and certain times and seasons. Many, if not most of the mischievous systems in physics and divinity have arisen from dim perceptions or erroneous apprehensions of some important truth. And not a few have originated in the common error of drawing bold and hasty inferences from weak premises. Sailors say, what they of all men have most opportunities of observing, that the moon as it rises clears the sky of clouds: _a puesta del sol_, says a Spanish chronicler, _parescio la luna, e comio poco a poco todas las nuves._ The “learned and reverend” Dr. Goad, sometime Master of Merchant Taylors' School, published a work “of vast pains, reading and many years experience,” which he called “_Astro-Meteorologia_, or a Demonstration of the Influences of the Stars in the alterations of the Air; proving that there is not an Earthquake, Comet, Parhelia, Halo, Thunder-storm or Tempest, or any other Phenomena, but is referable to its particular planetary aspect, as the sub-solar cause thereof.” CHAPTER XCIII. REMARKS OF AN IMPATIENT READER ANTICIPATED AND ANSWERED. Ὦ πολλὰ λέξας ἄρτι κάνόνητ᾽ ἔπη, Οὐ μνημονεύεις οὐκέτ᾽ οὐδὲν; SOPHOCLES. Novel readers are sometimes so impatient to know how the story is to end, that they look at the last chapter, and so—escape, should I say—or forfeit that state of agitating suspense in which it was the author or authoress's endeavour to keep them till they should arrive by a regular perusal at the well-concealed catastrophe. It may be apprehended that persons of this temper, having in their composition much more of Eve's curiosity than of Job's patience, will regard with some displeasure a work like the present, of which the conclusion is not before them; and some perhaps may even be so unreasonable as to complain that they go through chapter after chapter without making any progress in the story. “What care the Public,” says one of these readers, (for every reader is a self-constituted representative of that great invisible body)—“what do the Public care for Astrology and Almanacks, and the Influence of the Tides upon diseases, and Mademoiselle des Roches's flea, and the Koran, and the Chronology of this fellow's chapters, and Potteric Carr, and the Corporation of Doncaster, and the Theory of Signatures, and the Philosophy of the Alchemists, and the Devil knows what besides! What have these things to do with the subject of the book, and who would ever have looked for them in a Novel?” “A Novel do you call it, Mr. Reader?” “Yes, Mr. Author, what else should I call it? It has been reviewed as a Novel and advertised as a Novel.”