68 JEROME CARDAN. 



simply to note how frequently the ear as well as the eye 

 is deluded, when the nervous system is in a condition 

 that appears to have been constant with Cardan. The 

 sounds heard by him at Pavia portended no more than 

 is meant by the flashes of light which sometimes dart 

 before our weaned eyes. 



We do not find greater difficulty in perceiving with 

 how much ease Jerome may in lapse of time have fallen 

 into the belief that a supernatural event marked his first 

 experience in Latin. " Who was the man," he says, 

 u who sold me a Latin Apuleius when I was, I think, 

 about twenty years old, and instantly departed? I bought 

 it without judgment, for its gilded binding ; but the 

 next morning found that I could read it. Almost at the 

 same time I acquired the power of understanding Greek, 

 Latin, French, and Spanish, that is to say, so that I 

 could understand books in those languages, though un- 

 able to speak them and ignorant of their grammar 1 ." 

 There is nothing in this superstitious suggestion incon- 

 sistent with the record left by Cardan of the time spent 

 by him in acquiring languages and studying their gram- 

 mar. In his early college days he bought a Latin 

 Apuleius. He had been superficially practised in Latin 

 by conversation with his father, and the language differs 

 not so greatly from Italian as to make it wonderful that 

 1 De Vit. Propr. p. 225. 



