Alfred Russel Wallace

Seven of his ten planets sit in earth signs, with a single planet each in fire, air and water. Five of them are in Capricorn: the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Uranus and Neptune, across sixteen degrees of it. Jupiter was the only retrograde planet. The record says Wallace arrived at natural selection independently and sent it to Darwin in a letter, which is what finally made Darwin publish, and that he collected specimens for a living and lost years of them in a shipwreck.

Seven planets in earth, in a man whose living was collecting physical objects and keeping them, is the kind of fit that looks better than it is and is still worth printing. Earth is the element of what gets made and kept. A naturalist with crates of specimens is that sentence with a trade attached, and the identical count would read the same way in a bricklayer, which is the limit on it.

The Sun sits a fifth of a turn from Pluto at under half a degree, and the reading is power that is usable rather than overwhelming: resilience, the ability to start again after a loss, and an instinct for what is really going on beneath a situation. The record supplies the loss directly, in a shipwreck that took years of collecting with it, and a man who went back out and collected again. That is about as literal as a fit gets in this project, and it is also a reading that would be claimed by anybody who had ever recovered from anything at all.

Mercury sits conjunct Venus at four tenths of a degree, thought that is pleasing: a good ear for language, diplomacy, and a preference for the elegant answer over the exhaustive one, which in the man who sent a letter rather than a book is a pointed contact. Mars sits square Saturn at just under a degree, drive meeting refusal. His Moon sits on the sixth degree of Sagittarius at noon with Scorpio still possible, so it is left out, and the cost is unusually heavy: three of the six closest contacts in the chart run to that Moon, including the tightest of all at three hundredths of a degree. He died at Broadstone on 7 November 1913, at ninety. Venus stood square its own natal place at fifteen hundredths of a degree that day. The Moon was at its first quarter and sixty six per cent lit.