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hours as well as, or more than, of days: but these notices are only occasional. Still more significant is the fact that the full-dress refutations of astrology contain, so far as I know, not a single mention of the week system, though obviously, if it was regarded as a serious factor in astrology, it was a peculiarly vulnerable factor. Since the relations of Saturn to the other planets vary from Saturday to Saturday, how can Saturn have the same effect on human life, whenever this day recurs? The question was unanswerable; yet it is never asked. We have two such full-dress refutations which follow what were no doubt familiar lines of argument. One is a remarkable and interesting discussion by Sextus Empiricus, a writer of the later half of the second century A.D., who set himself to shew that all branches of learning were equally unreliable[1]. The other is in St Augustine's great treatise on The City of God[2]. Both deal with the contradictions to common sense involved in astrology, such as how, if it were true, could twins born under the same aspect of heaven have different destinies, as they do have. The fact that they do not mention the still greater absurdities involved in week observance shews that in their eyes it was hardly a part of astrological science, rather a vague popular superstition which did not need refutation. The sort of place that the week held in the estimation of later astrologers, at any rate, may
