There would be no absurdity in saying, "Such a child was born during the moon's increase, in a stormy season, at the rising of a certain star; its constitution was bad, and its life short and miserable, which is the ordinary lot of weak temperaments; another, on the contrary, was born when the moon was at the full, and the sun in all his power, in calm weather, at the rising of another particular star; his constitution was good, and his life long and happy." If such observations had been frequently repeated, and found just, experience might, at the end of a few thousand centuries, have formed an art which it would have been difficult to call in question; it would have been thought, not without some appearance of truth, that men are like trees and vegetables, which must be planted only in certain seasons. It would have been of no service against the astrologers to say, "My son was born in fine weather, yet he died in his cradle." The astrologer would have answered, "It often happens that trees planted in the proper season perish prematurely; I will answer for the stars, but not for the particular conformation which you communicated to your child; astrology operates only when there is no cause opposed to the good which they have power to work." [Illustration: An Astrologer.] Nor would astrology have suffered any more discredit from it being said: "Of two children who were born in the same minute, one became a king, the other nothing more than churchwarden of his parish;" for a defence would easily have been made by showing that the peasant made his fortune in becoming churchwarden, just as much as the prince did in becoming king. And if it were alleged that a bandit, hung up by order of Sixtus the Fifth, was born at the same time as Sixtus, who, from being a swineherd, became pope, the astrologers would say that there was a mistake of a few seconds, and that, according to the rules, the same star could not bestow the tiara and the gallows. It was, then, only because long-accumulated experience gave the lie to the predictions that men at length perceived that the art was illusory; but their credulity was of long duration.