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When this idea of planet sovereignty is applied to time in general, it obviously labours under one difficulty from which the other varieties which I have mentioned are free. In the case of plants, animals or metals, when we have once made up our mind which belongs to which planet, our difficulties are at an end. Saturn presides over onions, donkeys and lead, we are told. Well and good! We know these objects when we see them and can act upon our knowledge. So too with the 'chronocratory' of human life. We all know when we reach the age of 68 and pass from the presidency of Jupiter to that of Saturn. But how are we to know what day or hour belongs to each planet? True, when the sequence is once under way, we can follow it automatically. Sunday follows Saturday and Monday Sunday to all eternity. But what starting-point had it, as the chronocratory of human life has the birth for its starting-point? On the assumption that the planetary week has come down unbroken from some remote or prehistoric antiquity, we could only answer that we cannot tell, an answer which in fact we must make with regard to the Jewish Sabbath. But on what is to my mind the more probable hypothesis, that the planetary week came into use a century or two before our era, we can see how a starting-point could be obtained. The astrologers who first conceived the idea of assigning hours in sequence to the planets had the Jewish
