for coming events. It is therefore no wonder that these occasionally
fill our waking thoughts with a deep interest, and impress upon us an
anxiety of which we feel it difficult to rid ourselves. Accordingly,
in ages when men were more prone to superstition, than at present,
they sometimes constituted a subject of earnest anxiety and
inquisitiveness; and we find among the earliest exercises of the art
of prediction, the interpretation of dreams to have occupied a
principal place, and to have been as it were reduced into a science.


CASTING OF LOTS.

The casting of lots seems scarcely to come within the enumeration here
given. It was intended as an appeal to heaven upon a question involved
in uncertainty, with the idea that the supreme Ruler of the skies,
thus appealed to, would from his omniscience supply the defect of
human knowledge. Two examples, among others sufficiently remarkable,
occur in the Bible. One of Achan, who secreted part of the spoil taken
in Jericho, which was consecrated to the service of God, and who,
being taken by lot, confessed, and was stoned to death. [1] The other
of Jonah, upon whom the lot fell in a mighty tempest, the crew of the
ship enquiring by this means what was the cause of the calamity that
had overtaken them, and Jonah being in consequence cast into the sea.


ASTROLOGY.

Astrology was one of the modes most anciently and universally resorted
to for discovering the fortunes of men and nations. Astronomy and
astrology went hand in hand, particularly among the people of the