a kind of divination performed by means of points and lines, originally made by casting pebbles on the ground, and afterwards by marking or pricking dots at random upon paper, and forming therefrom a judgment of futurity, or deciding any question proposed. The dots and lines represented the stars, elements, &c., and hence this pretended science appears to have been a species of astrology. Geomancy was in high repute in Chaucer's time, and continued to flourish down to a late period. Among the last of its serious cultivators appears the name of Oughtred, the eminent mathematician, who died in 1660. Cornelius Agrippa besides some notices in his work, De Occulta Philosophia, has left an express tract De Geomantia; but he afterwards had the honesty to condemn his own production as false and lying, in his work De Vanitate Scientiarum. There was another kind of Geomancy, introduced by Almadul the Arabian, in which conjectures were drawn from rents and fissures in the earth, and which Polydore Virgil conceives to have been invented by the Persian Magi.

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1 In consequence of the lamented death of Professor Edward Forbes, who had agreed to contribute this article, it has been found necessary to postpone it.