to which has been added for the second edition the short treatise: Concerning Vulgar Prophecies

A Discourse Concerning Prodigies: Wherein the Vanity of Presages by them is reprehended, and their true and proper Ends asserted and vindicated, to which is added a short Treatise Concerning Vulgar Prophecies Wherein the Vanity of Receiving them as the certain Indications of any future Event is discovered And some Characters of Distinction between true and pretending Prophets are laid down ( Two parts in one volume )

"A greatly extended editon of Spencer's refutation of omens and apparitions and the first to include his new publication, a "Discourse Concerning Vulgar Prophecies." The book examines a copious assemblage of superstitions and auguries, such as comets, eclipses, the turning of ponds to blood and the moving of mountains, tracing the history of the Old Testament and classical mythology and commending the study of Natural Philosophy.

Several natural philosophers. wrote against the idea that prodigies are divine signs. The most thorough attack on providential interpretation came from John Spencer (1630-1690), a Cambridge professor and later friend of Isaac Newton. Spencer's Disourse Concerning Prodigies (1663) was inspired by widely circulated recent prodigy stories, such as that of an invasion of mice, that were presented as signs of God's displeasure with the English government. Religiously, Spencer argued that the most prodigies are trivial and unworthy of the divine majesty, mocking as ludicrous the idea of looking for the jewel of divine wisdom on the dunghill of obscene and monstrous births, apparitions of lying spirits, strange voices in the air, mighty winds, alterations in the face of heaven, &tc?