xliv INTRODUCTION

different style from Contagion, which is clear, concise and cor—
reect, but by no means Ciceronian.'

On the Rise of the Nile

Rannusio seems to have sent his criticisms on SympatAhy
in a letter, which Fracastorius did not print, when he replied
to them in the appendix to that work. Rannusio was himself
writing, at that time, his famous Vavigationi e Viaggi which
he published in 1550 and dedicated to Fracastorius.? In two
letters to him from Fracastorius dated 1539 and 1549, this
book is mentioned, and in the latter Fracastorius sets out at
length his own views on a subject much debated in that century
and discussed by Rannusio in his book. 'This was the cause of
the rise of the Nile, on which he wrote for Rannusio a formal
treatise, the Risposta dello excellentissimo Messer H. Fracastoro
del crescimento del Nilo; under this heading Rannusio printed
it in his book, and did not include it in his edition of the Opera

: Mencke and others reproach him with the '^barbarisms' that
occur in Comfagion; they mean such words as putrefactio, gwmmos—
itas, and many others, some Italian some Arabie, which occur in
no standard Latin author. L. Olschki in his Geschichöe der Neu—
sprachlichen Wissenschaflilichen I^Ateratur, Leipzig, 1922, Vol. II,
Bildung and Wissenschaft im Zeialer der Renaissance in Italien,
has much to say about the Latin style of Fracastorius. Though
he admits that '*Die vortrefflichsten Latinisten die in ihren Werken
auch etwas zu sagen hatten, sind Fracastoro und Vesal'! (p. 95), he,
too, dislikes the Grecisms and Barbarisms in CorWZagion, and
wishes that the regular Latin order of words, the conventional periods
and rhythms, had been observed. Of the chapter on Rabies, he
says that the short disconnected sentences give 'a faithful picture
of the stages of the malady'", whereas the style of the chapters on
the plague, typhus etc. are more analytical! in style. That is to
say, Olschki first asks too much of the Latin style of &a medical
work, and then discovers in it ingenious rhetorical devices which are
not there. Fracastorius was not thinking of style, but only how
to make himself clearly understood; to this end he is often tautologi—
eal, repeating the steps of his proof like a mathematician, and it is
unfair to him to omit, as does Fossel, the German translator, all
such repetitions. Olschki points out that, for Fracastorius and
Vesalius, there existed only Celsus as a model of good medica!
Latinity. There had, in fact, arisen a sort of «o») or ^common
dialect' of the scientific investigators of his time, which admits
words from any language and is free from humanistic pedantry.

^ The three volumes of this work are the most valuable document
that exists, for the cosmographical and geographical knowledge of
that century.