INTRODUCTION xvy

at another villa near Malcesine, he said, in & poem, that he was
abandoning his *herbal juices"^. — His biographer, Mencke, says
that he brought back into use many herbs that had been known
to the ancients and had fallen into neglect and become hard to
identify; and he wrote some sort of Herbal which has apparently
perished.

Cosmography

Inspired by the recent discovery of the New World, he studied
cosmography, and used to make wooden globes on which he
tried to show accurately, sometimes the whole known universe,
sometimes only the lands recently discovered. In a letter to
Rannusio (1533) he says he wants metal globes one foot in diame—
ter; and near the end of his life, writing in 1550 to Rannusio's
son Paolo, he says: "^My palla of the world is not yet finished . . .
your father will help me.^  In the contemporary portrait which
is the frontispiece to his Homocentrica, he holds an armillary
sphere, and the right hand of his statue in the Piazza dei Signori
at Verona holds a marble globe. In a letter to Rannusio, May
1549, he suggested the need of rectilinear maps; Mercator's Pro—
jection came twenty years later. He says in Sympathy and
Antipathy that he made certain experiments with magnets in
the presence of other doctors, and in thesame workhe writes pages
about the compass. Once, when he was in church, he observed
that whenever a bell rang, one of the waxen images that stood
high up in the choir would shake, while all the others remained
unmoved; this, he says, illustrates the law that wnisonum alzud
unisonum commotat, quoniam quae sim^iliter tensae sunt chordae,
consimiles aeris undationes et facere et recipere natae sunt.  In
short, nothing escaped his notice and he was never satisfied with
his conclusions.

Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus

For several years he had been working at his poem Syphi/is or
the French Sickness, and after many interruptions the work in
its earlier form was finished (1525) and through F. della "Torre
was presented to the famous humanist Bembo to whom it was
dedicated. 'This version, which was in two Books, is not extant
and we do not know whether it was printed or in MS. when he
sent it to Bembo. 'The latter, a poet himself and a good critic,
thought that too much space had been given to the myth of