JEROME CARDAN. 247 



dreams, hydrostatics and fortune telling, metallurgy and 

 card tricks. It stands squarely on the dividing line be- 

 tween mediaeval magic and modern physical science. 

 That the sixteenth century reader might well have re- 

 garded the work as be-deviled it is easy to imagine. If he 

 trusted himself to the figments of the author's boiling 

 i in agination, he found himself in the end disconcerted 

 with the dry remark that "many things appear admirable 

 until the cause is known ; then admiration ceases :'V if he 

 pinned his faith only to the statements of fact, again he 

 is laughed at and told that "some things seem more true 

 than they are others are more true than they seem." 

 The bewildered disciple, especially if imbued with the 

 philosopher's faith in demons and ghosts and apparitions, 

 may well regard this as the nimbleness of Mephisto, and, 

 recalling Cardan's wonderful cures and vast learning, his 

 strange luck at gambling, his, at times, reckless prodi- 

 gality and dissolute existence, may see in the Milanese 

 doctor another Faust and the slave of a Satanic compact. 

 But another and final contradiction awaits him on the very 

 last page of the book, where he finds this child of the 

 devil, prostrate as "an humble worm of the earth," ac- 

 knowledging, in a prayer of singular beauty, that "to 

 Thee I owe all that is here written in truth," that "the 

 errors and faults are of mine own ambition, rashness and 

 haste," and imploring for the Heavenly pardon and 

 "guidance to better things." 



The statements in Cardan's treatise which relate to the 

 amber so closely follow those on the same subject in the 

 famous work of George Agricola, 2 which appeared a few 

 years earlier, that the discoveries recorded which are Car- 

 dan's own are easily distinguished. Agricola's summary 

 of the uses and properties of amber contains probably all 

 that was then known concerning it. It was utilized in the 



'Often paraphrased since: e. g., "Science is anything we do not un- 

 derstand : the moment we understand it, it ceases to be science." 

 2 Agricola: De la Natura de le Cose Fossili. Venice, 1544. lib. iv. 



