ii2 JEROME CARDAN 



a special interest in his life and work. In dealing with 

 the Cosmos in the De Subtilitate he had indeed made 

 brief mention of Britain ; but, writing then, he had no 

 personal relations with either England or Scotland, or 

 the people thereof; and, but for his subsequent visit, 

 he would not have been able to set down in the pages of 

 his second book so many interesting and suggestive 

 notes of what he had seen and heard, and his ideas of 

 the politics of the time. Again, if he had not been 

 urged by the desire all men feel to read what others 

 may have to say about places they have visited, it is not 

 likely that he would have searched the volumes of 

 Hector Boethius and other early writers for legends and 

 stories of our island. Writing of Britain 1 in the De 

 Subtilitate he had praised its delicate wool and its 

 freedom from poisonous beasts : a land where the wolf 

 had been exterminated, and where the sheep might 

 roam unvexed by any beast more formidable than the 

 fox. The inordinate breeding of rooks seems even in 

 those days 2 to have led to a war of extermination 

 against them, carried on upon a system akin to that 

 which was waged against the sparrow in the memory of 



1 " Ergo nunc Britannia inclyta vellere est. Nee mirum cum 

 nullu animal venenatu mittat, imo nee infestum praeter vulpem, olim 

 et lupum : nunc vero exterminatis etiam lupis, tuto pecus vagat. 

 Rore cceli sitim sedant greges, ab omni alio potu arcentur, quod 

 aquae ibi ovibus sint exitiales : quia tamen in pabulo humido vermes 

 multi abundant, cornicu adeo multitude crevit, ut ob frugum damna 

 nuper publico consilio illas perdentibus proposita praemia sint : ubi 

 enim pabulum, ibi animalia sunt quas eo vescuntur, atque 

 immodice tune multiplicantur cum ubique abundaverit. Caret 

 tamen ut dixi, serpentibus, tribus ex causis : nam pauci possunt 

 generari ob frigus immensum." De Subtilitate, p. 298. 



2 ^Eneas Sylvius in describing his visit to Britain a century 

 earlier says that rooks had been recently introduced, and that the 

 trees on which they roosted and built belonged to the King's 

 Exchequer. 



