JEROME CARDAN 239 



a butcher's shop in the street, and animals going to 

 slaughter would naturally be met there. Why should 

 a man fear to meet a cow ? If it had been a bull there 

 might have been something in it. Then with regard to 

 the shaking of a window-casement ; this might easily 

 have been occasioned by the flight of a bird. 1 He was 

 certainly less inclined to put faith in the warnings of the 

 stars and in the lines of his hand. His line of life was 

 very short and irregular, intersected and bifurcated, 

 while the rest of the lines were little thicker than hairs. 

 In his horoscope was a certain malefic influence which 

 threatened that his life would be cut short before his 

 forty-fifth year. " But," he writes in the year before his 

 death, " here I am, living at the age of seventy-five." 2 

 The one supernatural idea which seems to have 

 deepened with old age and remained undisturbed to 

 the end was his belief in his attendant genius. In 

 what he wrote during his last years his mood was almost 

 entirely introspective, contemplative, and didactic, yet 

 here and there he introduces a sentence which lets in 

 a little light from his way of life and personal affairs, 

 and helps to show how he occupied himself, and what 

 his humour was. He tells how one day, in 1576, he was 

 writing about the fennel plant in his treatise De Tuenda 

 Sanitate^ a plant which he praised highly because it 

 pleased his palate. But shortly afterwards, when he 

 was walking one day in the Roman vegetable market, 

 an old man, shabbily dressed, met him and dissuaded 

 him from the use of the plant aforesaid, saying : " In 

 Galen's opinion you may as readily meet your death 



1 Opera, torn. i. p. 639. In the De Varietate he says that 

 natural causes may in most cases be found for seeming marvels. 

 " Ecce auditur strepitus in domo, potest esse mus, felis, ericius, 

 aut quod tigna subsidant blatta." p. 624. 



2 De Vita Propria^ ch. xli. p. 152. 



