of its laws as not only being unchangeable in our universe, but
necessary to the conception of any universe that might have been
substituted in its place. The first inhabitants of the world were
compelled to accommodate their acts to the daily and annual
alternations of light and darkness and of heat and cold, as much as to
the irregular changes of weather, attacks of disease, and the fortune
of war. They soon came to regard the influence of the sun, in
connection with light and heat, as a cause. This led to a search for
other signs in the heavens. If the appearance of a comet was sometimes
noted simultaneously with the death of a great ruler, or an eclipse
with a scourge of plague, these might well be looked upon as causes in
the same sense that the veering or backing of the wind is regarded as
a cause of fine or foul weather.

For these reasons we find that the earnest men of all ages have
recorded the occurrence of comets, eclipses, new stars, meteor
showers, and remarkable conjunctions of the planets, as well as
plagues and famines, floods and droughts, wars and the deaths of great
rulers. Sometimes they thought they could trace connections which
might lead them to say that a comet presaged famine, or an eclipse
war.

Even if these men were sometimes led to evolve laws of cause and
effect which now seem to us absurd, let us be tolerant, and gratefully
acknowledge that these astrologers, when they suggested such "working
hypotheses," were laying the foundations of observation and deduction.

If the ancient Chaldaeans gave to the planetary conjunctions an
influence over terrestrial events, let us remember that in our own
time people have searched for connection between terrestrial