120 JEROME CARDAN. 



body of the superstition of his age, yet it may be said of 

 him, more truly perhaps than of any one of his contem- 

 poraries, that he embraced and amplified also the whole 

 body of its learning. 



While struggling unsuccessfully in Gallarate, breathing 

 the fresh country air, and able to satisfy no more than 

 the wants of nature in the simplest way, Jerome's health 

 steadily improved, and Lucia, who did not again disap- 

 point his hopes, gave birth to a son on Thursday, the 14th 

 of May, in the year T534 1 . The child resembled most 

 its grandfather, for it had small, white, restless eyes, and 

 a round back ; it was born also with the third and fourth 

 toes of the left foot joined together, and proved, as it 

 grew, to be deaf in the right ear. It being at first un- 

 certain whether the boy would live, it was baptised on 

 the succeeding Sunday, between eleven and twelve 

 o'clock, by the bedside of its mother, all the household 

 being present, except a famulus. Then, because the day 

 was warm and sunny, they had drawn aside the curtain 

 from before the window, and had thrown the window 

 open to admit the light and air. And at the moment 

 when the child was lifted from the font or basin, chris- 



1 De Libris Propriis (1557), p. 22. "Cumvero parum esset mihi 

 eo eunti, totum tamen illud parum consumptum erat. Sed valitudo 

 restituta, yiresque confirmatae, et filio auctus eram." See for date of 

 the son's birth, and the account of his baptism, De Vita Propria, 

 cap. xxxvii., and especially the last of the three books De Libris 

 Propriis. Opera, Tom. i. p. 98. 



