xxviii INTRODUCTION

son of Niobe. DBut Boll did not observe that, in Fracastorius
himself there is what at first sight seems to be still more strik—
ing evidence for the identification of Sipylus andSyphilus.  In
a poem addressed to G. B. della Torre by Fracastorius, a lament
for the death of his two sons, about 1516, he says that even
lofty mountains, for instance, Thaygefus, Syphilusque, (i. e.
Taygetus and Sipylus)' are subject to age and decay. So far
as the spelling is concerned, here we have the shepherd's name.
But again there is what seems, to me, an insuperable difficulty
as to quantity. For in this lament it is correct, i. e. Syphilus,
and if we accept Boll's ingenious theory, we must suppose that,
at the very time when Fracastorius was writing the first ver—
sion of Syphilis, and with Ovid before him, he knew and used
the correct quantity in the lament, but, in the vastly more
important medical poem, wrote the false quantity both for
the shepherd's name and for the disease. I do not assert that
he was incapable of a false quantity in words that do not occur
in his favorite Latin poets; in fact he writes rösina for resina
in Sygphilis, Book II; but he was too good a Latin versifier to
make such a blunder over a well—known name in Ovid. But
for this difficulty, Bol!s theory seems to be the best explana—
tion that has so far been attempted. For it is likely that he
desired to coin, for this new disease, a colorless word which
should be free from the geographical or symptomatic implica—
tions of the scores of descriptive names that were then current.
His appellation has, in fact, supplanted all the rest because it is
non—committal and at the time, widely advertised as it was by
the literary success of the poem, could be used without offence.
In the New Vork Medical Journat, Vol. 88, 1908, J. Knott,
The Origin of Syphilis and the Invention of is Name, gives
some of the earlier derivations but arrives at no conclusion.

: 'The curious spelling is characteristic of the praectice of that
century. So Fracastorius writes a(homus for atomus, and, in Con—
iagion, puhiocamype for pityocampe. 'This habit has complicated
the problem presented by the word syphilis. In Corfagion. II.
Ch. 15, where he attempts to write the word in Greek characters,
it occurs in the texts as «(J(Ms or c(ojNs; both forms were of
eourse unknown to the Greeks. / They occur in a list of skin diseases,
and when he repeats that list at the end of the chapter he uses the
Latin form. 'The Greek variants indicate his or the printer's
ignorance of Greek and throw no light on the meaning that he at—
tached to the word that he had coined.