Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
"Ergo nunc Britannia inclyta vellere est. Caret tamen ut dixi, serpentibus, tribus ex causis: nam pauci possunt generari ob frigus immensum." De Subtilitate, p. 298. Æneas 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.
At dinner-time, he went into the room of a friend, whom he found lost in the utmost astonishment. A huge book, Cardan's De Subtilitate, had flown at him across the room, and the leaves had turned, under invisible fingers! There are plenty of bogles in that book.
A comparison of the treatment accorded to any particular branch of Natural Philosophy in the De Subtilitate with that given in the De Varietate, will show that in the last-named work Cardan used his most discursive and anecdotic method.
He takes an agnostic position, confining his positive statement to an assertion of his own inability to realize the presence of any ghostly minister attendant upon himself. In the De Subtilitate he tells an experience of his own by way of suggesting that some of the demons spoken of by the retailers of marvels might be figments of the brain.
In the first and second editions of the De Subtilitate was another passage in which the tenets of Islam and the circumstances of the birth of Christ were handled in a way which caused grave scandal and offence. This passage indeed was expunged in the edition of 1560.
There is a reference to Osiander in De Subtilitate, p. 523. Cardan gives a full account of his relations with Osiander and Petreius in Opera, tom. i. p. 67. November 1536. Ferrari was one of Cardan's most distinguished pupils. "Ludovicus Ferrarius Bononiensis qui Mathematicas et Mediolani et in patria sua professus est, et singularis in illis eruditionis." De Vita Propria, ch. xxxv. p. 111.
He adds, "I pass over the other inventions of this age which, though wonderful, form rather a development of ancient arts than surpass the intellects of our ancestors." De subtilitate, lib. 3 ad init. VII., pp. 359-61.
Mechanics are chiefly dealt with in the De Subtilitate, and all through this treatise he set himself to observe in a certain degree the laws of proportion, and kept more or less to the point with which he was dealing, a system of treatment which left him with a vast heap of materials on his hands, even after he had built up the heavy tome of the De Subtilitate.
The inordinate breeding of rooks seems even in those days 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 men yet living. But besides this one, he records, in the De Subtilitate, few facts concerning Britain.
Where he occupies in the De Subtilitate one page in considering those things which lie outside Nature demons, ghosts, incantations, succubi, incubi, divinations, and such like he spends ten in the De Varietate over kindred subjects. There is a wonderful story 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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking