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 1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 243 features agree with the Virgilian scenery. Thus the fontis stagna Numici is the ' Canale dello Stagno ', and Albunea is, of course, the Zolforata, an hour's walk from Prattica, though we may remark that it is hardly correct to say that this identification, originally made by the Swiss Bonstetten in 1805, has been rejected by all the modern commentators. The reason why Virgil connected the city of Aeneas with the primitive sanctuary of Ostia was his desire to commend the project of Augustus to create a new harbour, the portus Augusti,. for the rebuilt town, a project which was carried out by Claudius. This theme is developed with a remarkable wealth of detail and illustration. If M. Carcopino does not always carry us with him the whole way of his conclusions, his arguments and evidence are always full of suggestion and information. The book is an important contribution to the study both of Virgil and of the topography of ancient Latium. G. McN. Rushforth. The Mediaeval Attitude towards Astrology, particularly in England. By Theodore Otto Wedel. (Yale Studies in English, lx. Newhaven, Connecticut : Yale University Press, 1920.) This is a valuable study of a very interesting subject. Mr. Wedel shows how the study of judicial astrology, which had fallen out of favour during the early middle ages owing to the hostility of the church, revived in the twelfth century under Arabian influence, and came to play a con- siderable part in the intellectual life of the succeeding age. He is inclined to represent the success of this movement in the teeth of theological opposition as constituting, despite the now generally admitted baselessness of astrological theory, a genuine victory for the scientific spirit ; and he has therefore but little respect for the patristic, mediaeval, and renaissance critics of the doctrine of stellar influences. The facts, however, of which he has given us a very full and useful account, may be looked at from a different point of view. No doubt the champions of astrology may often have deserved, like many other defenders of erroneous views, the admira- tion which is always due to boldness of speculation and to disregard of personal danger in the cause of what is held to be truth. No doubt again, if we look in the later middle ages for an analogue to what is nowadays called ' naturalism ' — that is, the philosophy which affirms the possibility of explaining the whole experience of mankind, religion and morality included, on the principles applicable to nature as distinguished from spirit — we shall find it in the astrological determinism which maintained itself in some quarters until the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology had finally given way to the Copernican. But it is very questionable whether the true interests of natural science were at any time really bound up with those of judicial astrology, and whether there is not more to be said than Mr. Wedel allows for the arguments brought against it by its theological opponents. Mr. Wedel sometimes seems to do less than justice to the importance of the distinction which exists between admitting that the bodily condition of men, and therefore their mental condition so far as affected thereby, might be determined by ' the stars ' — that is, by the general course of R2