xlvi INTRODUCTION

his works. As a matter of course he read Hippocrates, Dios—
curides and Galen, in Latin translations, Pliny and Celsus, and
the Latin translations of the Arabian medical writers; his letters
show that he was familiar with the more recent botanical writers
such as Ruellius and Fuchs.  Like all the humanists of his time
he knew the Latin poets, especially Catullus and Virgil, with a
thoroughness that is seldom achieved by Professors of Latin
today, and that perhaps can only come of ^"playing the sedulous
ape' to an author, after the fashion of the humanists.

I think it is obvious that he devoted less attention to the
Bible than to Virgil and the lesser Latin poets. That evil
agents such as demons might be responsible for disease, he did
not need to find in the Bible, for the theory was still widely
current in his day, and he probably has in mind this superstition
among others when, in Cornfagion and elsewhere, he condemns
in general terms the resort to abditae causae, hidden causes,
to account for disease. But surely, to so acute an observer, if
he had known them, certain passages in the Old Testament, on
epidemies, would have suggested, even if they did not to their
authors, the pathogenic possibilities of the fly, the mosquito
and rodents. In the only passage where he mentions insects in
connection with infection, he says that locusts may carry in
them the seeds of contagion, and from masses of dead locusts
infection may arise, but that is all.

Joseph.

During the last years of his life he was occupied in the com—
position of a poem based on the last thirteen chapters of Genesis.
Perhaps it was Cardinal Farnese, to whom it is dedicated, who
suggested that the medical adviser of the Council of Trent, the
friend of so many prelates, would do well to turn from Pagan
themes and write a Biblical epic. His Josep^h in Latin hexa—
meters, of which more than 1200 verses are extant, was left
unfinished at his death. Like Syph(hs, it is in the style of
Virgil, and in places closely imitates the /Zned. Nearly half
a& century later, a learned poet, Luisini, completed it with &
Third Book; for, he says, Frasforus haec lnquens successit
Olympo, "*Frastorus has left it unfinished and retired to Olympus,
at which the Muses weep'. Even in this poem, Fracastorius
could not bring himself to renounce classical allusions and per—
sonages such as Pluto and the Furies, strange company for