ASTROLOGICAL CREDULITY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE"SPECTATOR?']
Sin,—I observe in your article on the Slade sentence, in the Spectator of to-day's date, a reference to the "queer astrological fancies" diffused among the ignorant classes.
The professional student of science has at times strange proofs of the wide diffusion of these and equally irrational beliefs. Some three years back, when acting as assistant to Mr. J. Norman Lockyer, I was engaged in measuring and drawing the sun's chromosphere. Being one day in the observatory, employed in this manner, the laboratory-boy, who was with me, asked whether I was looking for comets. On asking him his reason for the question, he replied that he thought comets were looked for because, when they came, there was going to be a war. On another occasion, another boy asked me if I could read the stars, and on my asking for his reason for the question, he replied that his grandmother thought that perhaps I could find out for him what business he might best undertake when he became a man.
In fact, from what I have heard from other scientific men of their laboratory-boys, I am certain that the ignorant classes regard scientific investigation, unless manifestly pursued for industrial purposes, as either the Black Art or a form of madness, more generally the former. Even as regards medicine, there is but too much evidence to show that many, not altogether of the most ignorant class, regard the useful practice of hospital post-mortem examinations as a kind of brutal amusement, carried on for the sole benefit of the doctors concerned.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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