SCOT AT THE COURT OF SICILY 31 



nothing but the urgent desire of Court and people 

 that the marriage should prove fruitful can explain, 

 one might add excuse, some passages of almost 

 fescennine licence which it contains. 1 We seem to 

 find in the advice of the preface that Frederick should 

 study man, encouraging the learned to dispute in 

 his presence what may well have been the last 

 word of a master who saw his pupil passing to scenes 

 of larger and more active life at an unusually early 

 age, and before he could be fully trusted to take his 

 due place in the great world of European politics. 



The Physionomia, however, is too important a 

 work to be dismissed in a paragraph. Both the 

 subject itself, and the sources from which Scot 

 drew, deserve longer consideration. The science of 

 physiognomy, as its name imports, was derived 

 from the Greeks. Achinas, a contemporary of the 

 Hippocratic school, and Philemon, who is mentioned 

 in the introduction to Scot's treatise, seem to have 

 been the earliest writers in this department of 

 philosophy. It was a spiritual medicine, 2 and 

 formed part of the singular doctrine of signatures, 

 teaching as it did that the inward dispositions of 

 the soul might be read in visible characters upon 

 the bodily frame. The Alexandrian school made a 

 speciality of physiognomy. In Egypt it attained a 

 further development, and various writings in Greek 

 which expounded the system passed current during 

 the early centuries of our era under the names of 



1 Zurita says that Sancia, the Queen Dowager of Aragon, claimed 

 the crown of Sicily for her son Fernando, in case there were no heir of 

 Frederick n. by Constance. 



2 See on this whole subject three most learned and satisfactory 

 works by Prof. R. Foerster of Breslau De Arist, quae feruntur 

 physiognomonicis recensendis, Kiliae, 1882 ; De trans, lat. physiogno- 

 monicorum, Kiliae, 1884 ; and especially his Scriptores Graeci Physio- 

 gnomonici, Teubner, 1894. 



