no JEROME CARDAN 



incantations, succubi, incubi, divinations, and such like 

 he spends ten in the De Varietate over kindred 

 subjects. There is a wonderful story 1 told by his 

 father of a ghost or demon which he saw in his 

 youth while he was a scholar in the house of Giovanni 

 Resta at Pavia. He searches the pages of Hector 

 Boethius, Nicolaus Donis, Rugerus, Petrus Toletus, 

 Leo Africanus, and other chroniclers of the marvellous, 

 for tales of witchcraft, prodigies, and monstrous men 

 and beasts, and devotes a whole chapter to chiro- 

 mancy, 2 a subject with which he had occupied his 

 plenteous leisure when he was waiting for patients at 

 Sacco. The diagram of the human hand given by him 

 does not differ greatly from that of the contemporary 

 hand-books of the "Art," and the leading lines are 

 just the same. The heavenly bodies are as potent here 

 as in Horoscopy. The thumb is given to Mars, the 

 index finger to Jupiter, the middle finger to Saturn, the 

 ring finger to the Sun, and the little finger to Venus. 

 Each finger-joint has its name, the lowest being called 

 the procondyle, the middle the condyle, and the upper 

 the metacondyle. He passes briefly over as lines of 

 little import, the via combusta and the Cingulus 

 Orionis, but lays some stress on the character of the 

 nails and the knitting together of the hand, declaring 

 that hands which can be bent easily backward denote 

 effeminacy or a rapacious spirit. He teaches that lines 

 are most abundant in the hands of children, on account 

 of the tenderness of the skin, and of old men on account 

 of the dryness, a statement which might suggest the 

 theory that lines come into existence through the open- 

 ing and closing of the hand. But the adoption of this 

 view would have proved more disastrous to chiromancy 

 1 De Varietate, p. 66 1, 2 Book XV. ch. Ixxix. 



