CAKDAN AND PALISSY. 59 



on Subtilty were so exact in their method as to exclude 

 very many topics for which there was room found in the 

 other treatise, which is to be taken as the sequel or 

 appendix to it 1 . 



These productions attained great popularity, and con- 

 tain many isolated specimens of ingenuity, applications 

 of knowledge to common life, as to the raising of sunken 

 vessels, the cure of smoky chimneys, the manufacture of 

 writing ink and such matters; for, as the reader may have 

 perceived, Jerome's quick wit was ready to apply itself to 

 any topic ranging between speculation on the Cosmos and 

 the management of washerwomen. His generalisations 

 upon nature do not, however, rise above the level of the 

 knowledge current in his time among philosophers. He 

 and his neighbours taught what they had learnt from 

 Aristotle, Pliny, and Theophrastus ; where they differed 

 from such guides, it was not often to good purpose. The 

 poor potter, Bernard Palissy, of whom the world then 

 knew nothing, and who, at the crisis of his fate, was 

 building his own furnace at Saintes with bleeding hands, 

 while Cardan wrote upon subtilty at Pavia, Palissy knew 

 more truth about those ways of nature that he had ob- 

 served than had been perceived by Aristotle, or than 

 was taught by all the learned of that century I might 

 almost add of the next. Cardan's fame as an author was 

 1 DeLibrisPropriis. Lib. ult. Opera, Tom. i. p. 74. 



