PALMISTRY. 95 



in soaping the back of some important card, so that the 

 others should slip from it when it was thrown down 

 among them. Thomas Lezun, a Venetian patrician, 

 used to cheat Cardan with soaped cards. We may sup- 

 pose that when a trick of that kind could be practised 

 the cards used were not particularly clean. Nor should 

 we connect with them any associations drawn from the 

 modern whist-table : in most games played in the time of 

 Cardan, cards were used only as paper-dice. This trea- 

 tise closes with a little chapter upon the use of dice 

 among the ancients. 



Of the works already named as having been written by 

 Jerome during the six or seven years of his life in Sacco, 

 there remain two, both of which underwent at a later 

 period of their author's life a great deal of revision. One 

 of them is the little treatise upon Cheiromancy, which, 

 afterwards was published as a chapter in a philosophic 

 work of great extent, the labour of maturer years. In his 

 maturest years, however, Cardan never escaped from the 

 hold of superstition. Stars and dreams were always por- 

 tents to him, and he never ceased to believe that there 

 was a portentous science to be studied on the palm of a 

 man's hand. The hand, he said, is the instrument of the 

 body, as the tongue is of the mind 1 . He therefore studied 



1 De Kerum Varietate Libri xvii. (Basil. 1557) Lib, xv, cap. Lxxix. 

 p, 557, 



