BARNACLE GEESE GOOSE BARNACLES. 293 



we may, of course, expect to see his bitter opponent, Julius 

 Caesar Scaliger,* appear (probably more satirically than 

 sincerely) as a champion on the other side. Accordingly, 

 we find him not only prepared to challenge the correctness 

 of Cardano's judgment, but also giving publicity to a new 

 version of the legend, in which it is asserted that the leaves 

 which fall from the tree into the water are converted into 

 fishes, and those which fall upon the land become birds. 

 In his " Exercitatioms? f addressed to Girolamo Cardano, 

 Scaliger says : 



" I must not pass over in silence that which is reported of a river in 

 Juverna (Ireland), namely, that a certain tree grows on its banks the 

 leaves of which when they fall into its water as.sume the form of fishes. 

 These fishes come to life a phenomenon which, on careful considera- 

 tion, appears to be attributable less to any power or property of the 

 said river than to the tree itself ; for those leaves of the latter which 



* Julius Csesar Scaliger, born in 1484, probably at Padua, was one 

 of the most celebrated of the many great writers of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury. He was a man of real talent, but, also, of unbounded vanity 

 and unscrupulous ambition. Originally baptized " Jules," he added 

 " Caesar " to his name, and, to enhance his own merits by the tdat of 

 high birth, made for himself a false genealogy, and asserted that he 

 was the hero of adventures in which he had taken no part. In order 

 to force himself into notice, he attacked Erasmus, and in two harangues, 

 which the latter disdained to answer, used towards him the grossest 

 invectives. Scaliger next directed his insolent hostility against 

 Giralomo Cardano. Jealous of the fame of the great Pavian physician 

 and mathematician, he, in a critique containing more insults than 

 arguments, ferociously assailed Cardano's treatise, De Subtilitate, and 

 so exaggerated was the estimate he formed of the effect of his diatribes 

 on the objects of his malice, that, when Erasmus died, and a false 

 rumour was spread abroad of the decease of Cardano, he believed, or 

 affected to believe, that the death of both had been caused by his 

 conduct towards them, and, in fulsome terms of eulogy, expressed his 

 regret for having deprived the world of letters of two such valuable 

 lives. Scaliger died in 1558, aged seventy-five years. 



f Exoticarum Exercitationum Liber XV. De subtilitate; ad 

 Hieronymum Cardanum. Paris, 1557. Exercit 59, sect. 2. 



