Astrology is the oldest science in the world. The ancient Egyptians were past masters in the art of casting horoscopes, the Tetrabiblos of Claudius Ptolemaeus, written over eighteen hundred years ago, being still the authority and source of all our present knowledge. Modern scholars are at last beginning to take up this long-neglected branch of science, and before many years one may look to see such strides taken in its advancement, as will lift it at once out of the mist of superstition, charlatanry and error through which it has been viewed so long, into the clearer light of modern research.

The preposterous predictions and generally unscrupulous use of the science made by fortunetellers for their own profit under the cloak of Astrology, have left it, with witchcraft and augury, in the ranks of superstition from which hypnotism has only just emerged.

Palmistry has advanced wonderfully in the last decade, especially along the line of character reading, but is still viewed with suspicion by the uninitiated and by those who do not understand its value.

In science—given a cause one gets a specified result.

And this is where Astrology begins to be a science, and ceases to be simply an art.

In palmistry—given a certain line in a certain place, one gets a certain characteristic.

In Astrology, the character of a person born at one time of the year will differ radically from a brother or sister born at another time of year, and have many characteristics in common with an utter stranger born in the same month. It does not seek to disprove heredity at all—as the mannerisms and appearances of a family may be astonishingly alike—but it strives to account for the wonderfully dissimilar characters found in a single family.

The fact that it deals with character, and gives reasons for what has heretofore seemed so unreasonable, has condemned Astrology where it should have attraoted. Psychology—though a mere experiment as yet, is accepted as at least the beginnings of a science, to fill the place which is so vacant. This younger science might learn something from its hoary predecessor.

The Egyptians and anoient Greeks understood and practised an Astrology more perfect than we, from the few meagre remnants left us, can understand. They worked on the basis that harmony is unconsciously maintained between certain people and discord, as unintentionally among others, and that Astrology points out the road to either —so with them the marriage problem must have been to a great extent eliminated. At any rate we know that the Egyptians, and the Greeks after them, were a race of such beauty that none since have reached, much less surpassed their standard. And yet they labored under the delusion that a flat earth stood still and the sun, moon and stars revolved around it. For this reason modern astronomers discredit the whole system, astronomy and astrology, whereas the fact still remains that summer and winter, spring and fall went on just the same with them as with us, and that certain characteristics are predominant in individuals born at certain times of the year—then as now—although they thought the earth the centre of the universe, and we know it to be only a very unimportant satellite of one star. The stars look the same now as then, for though we have moved on thirty degrees in our heavenly journey it is unnoticeable in the sky—and the unimportant mistake of not classifying the causes aright has not changed the truth of the results.