The development that their astrology had given
to 'genethliaque,' or the art of horoscopes of births, had led
them early to attribute great importance to all the teratologic
facts which were there produced. They claimed that an experience
of 470,000 years of observations, all concordant, fully justified
their system, and that in nothing was the influence of the stars
marked in a more indubitable manner than in the fatal law which
determined the destiny of each individual according to the state
of the sky at the moment when he came into the world. Cicero, by
the very terms which he uses to refute the Chaldeans, shows that
the result of these ideas was to consider all infirmities and
monstrosities that new-born infants exhibited as the inevitable
and irremediable consequence of the action of these astral
positions. This being granted, the observation of similar
monstrosities gave, as it were, a reflection of the state of the
sky; on which depended all terrestrial things; consequently, one
might read in them the future with as much certainty as in the
stars themselves. For this reason the greatest possible
importance was attached to the teratologic auguries which occupy
so much space in the fragments of the great treatise on
terrestrial presages which have up to the present time been
published.
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