Many of the stronger minds of the Renaissance broke away from the follies of the subject.  Thus Cornelius Agrippa in reply to the request of a friar to consult the stars on his behalf says:(29) “Judicial astrology is nothing more than the fallacious guess of superstitious men, who have founded a science on uncertain things and are deceived by it:  so think nearly all the wise; as such it is ridiculed by some most noble philosophers; Christian theologians reject it, and it is condemned by sacred councils of the Church.  Yet you, whose office it is to dissuade others from these vanities, oppressed, or rather blinded by I know not what distress of mind, flee to this as to a sacred augur, and as if there were no God in Israel, that you send to inquire of the god of Ekron.”

     (29) H. Morley:  The Life of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, London,
     1856, Vol.  II, p. 138.

In spite of the opposition of the Church astrology held its own; many of the universities at the end of the fifteenth century published almanacs, usually known as “Prognosticons,” and the practice was continued far into the sixteenth century.  I show you here an illustration.  Rabelais, you may remember, when physician to the Hotel Dieu in Lyons, published almanacs for the years 1533, 1535, 1541, 1546.  In the title-page he called himself “Doctor of Medicine and Professor of Astrology,” and they continued to be printed under his name until 1556.  In the preparation of these he must have had his tongue in his cheek, as in his famous “Pantagrueline Prognostication,” in which, to satisfy the curiosity of all good companions, he had turned over all the archives of the heavens, calculated the quadratures of the moon, hooked out all that has ever been thought by all the Astrophils, Hypernephilists, Anemophylakes, Uranopets and Ombrophori, and felt on every point with Empedocles.(30)

     (30) Pantagrueline Prognostication, Rabelais, W. F. Smith’s
     translation, 1893, Vol.  II, p. 460.

Even physicians of the most distinguished reputation practised judicial astrology.  Jerome Cardan was not above earning money by casting horoscopes, and on this subject he wrote one of his most popular books (De Supplemento Almanach, etc., 1543), in which astronomy and astrology are mixed in the truly mediaeval fashion.  He gives in it some sixty-seven nativities, remarkable for the events they foretell, with an exposition.  One of the accusations brought against him was that he had “attempted to subject to the stars the Lord of the stars and cast our Saviour’s horoscope."(31) Cardan professed to have abandoned a practice looked upon with disfavor both by the Church and by the universities, but he returned to it again and again.  I show here his own horoscope.  That remarkable character, Michael Servetus, the discoverer of the lesser circulation, when a fellow student with Vesalius at Paris, gave lectures upon judicial astrology, which brought him