All hail to the moon, all hail to thee, I prithee, good moon, reveal to me This night who my husband shall be. You must presently after go to bed. The aforesaid Mr. Aubrey knew two gentlewomen that did thus when they were young maids, and they had dreams of those that married them. But a great many of the wittiest part of your sex laugh at these common superstitions; but then they are apt to run into worse: they give themselves up to the reading of the cabalistical systems of sylphs, and gnomes, and mandrakes, which are very wicked and delusive imaginations. I would not have you imagine, ladies, that I impute these things as infirmities and frailties peculiar to your sex. No; men, and great men too, and scholars, and even statesmen, and princes themselves, have been tainted with superstitions, and where they infect the minds of such great personages, they make the deeper impression, according to the stronger and more manly ideas they have of them. Their greater degree of strength in the intellect only subjects them to greater weaknesses; such was even the great Paracelsus, the wonder and miracle of learning in the age wherein he lived, and such were all his followers, scholars, statesmen, divines, and princes, that are talismanists. These talismans that Paracelsus pretends to owe to the excogitation and invention of honest art, seem to me to be of a very diabolical nature, and to owe their rise to being dedicated by the author to the heathen gods. Thus the cabalists pretending to a vast penetration into arts and sciences, though all their thoughts are chimeras and extravagancies, unless they be helped by preternatural means, say they have found out the several methods appropriated to the several planets. They have appropriated gold to the sun on the Sunday, silver to the moon on the Monday, iron to Mars on the Tuesday, quicksilver to Mercury on the Wednesday, tin to Jupiter on the Thursday, copper or brass to Venus on the Friday, and lead to Saturn on the Saturday. The methods they take in forming these talismans are too long to dwell upon here. But the properties which they pretend belong to them are, that the first talisman or seal of the sun will make a man beloved by all princes and potentates, and cause him to abound with all the riches his heart can wish. The second preserves travellers from danger, and is favourable to merchants, tradesmen, and workmen. The third carries destruction to any place where it is put: and it is said that a certain great minister of state ordered one of these to be carried into England in the times of the revolution of government caused by Oliver Cromwell. The fourth they pretend cures fevers and other diseases; and if it be put under the bolster, it makes the proprietor have true dreams, in which he sees all he desires to know. The fifth, according to them, renders a man lucky and fortunate in all his businesses and undertakings. It dissipates