[144] The Registrar-General in his last Report writes thus:—“Seamen will not sail, women will not wed on a Friday so willingly as on other days of the week. It has been ascertained that out of 4,057 marriages which took place during a certain period in the midland district of England, not two per cent. were celebrated on a Friday, while thirty-two per cent. were entered as having taken place on a Sunday.”
[145] Jerome Cardan, the strange sixteenth-century physician, who dealt so extensively in horoscopes, and is said to have sought the assistance of spirits, professed to own and exercise some specific and supernatural gifts:—1. The power of throwing his spirit out of his body, by which he could see things at a distance. 2. His faculty of Second Sight, or of seeing whatever he pleased with his eyes, “Oculis, non vi mentis.” 3. His dreams, which, as he maintained, uniformly foretold to him what was about to occur, and by which he truly predicted the day of his own death, and 4. his “unerring astrological knowledge.”
[146] “Miscellanies, collected by J. Aubrey, Esq.” London: printed for Edward Castle, 1696.
[147] “A Treatise on the Second Sight, Dreams, and Apparitions,” by Theophilus Insulanus. Dedicated “To the Honourable Sir Harry Monro, of Foulis, Baronet.” Pp. 107-108. Edinburgh: 1763.
Transcriber’s Note:
The General Index was not a part of the original text. It has been copied from Volume II of the series.