[163] _De Vita Propria_, ch. iv. p. 16: "cum Scotorum Regina cujus levirum curaveram." Cardan had probably prescribed for a brother of the Duc de Longueville, the first husband of Mary of Guise, during his sojourn in Paris. [164] _Geniturarum Exempla_, p. 459. [165] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xl. p. 137. [166] _Commentaria in Ptolemaei de Astrorum Judiciis_ (Basil, 1554). He wrote these notes while going down the Loire in company with Cassanate on his way from Lyons to Paris in 1552.--_De Vita Propria_, ch. xlv. p. 175. He gives an interesting account (_Opera_, tom. i. p. 110) as to how the book first came under his notice. The day before he quitted Lyons with Cassanate, a school-master came to ask for advice, which Cardan gave gratis. Then the patient, knowing perhaps the physician's taste for the marvellous, related how there was a certain boy in the place who could see spirits by looking into an earthen vessel, but Cardan was little impressed by what he saw, and began to talk with the school-master about Archimedes. The school-master brought out a work of the Greek philosopher with which was bound up the _Ptolemaei Libri de Judiciis_. Cardan fastened upon it at once, and wanted to buy it, but the school-master insisted that he should take it as a gift. He declares that his Commentaries thereupon are the most perfect of all his writings. The book contains his famous Nativity of Christ. A remark in _De Libris Propriis_ (cf. _Opera_, tom. i. p. 67) indicates that there was an earlier edition of Ptolemy, printed at Milan at Cardan's own cost, because when he saw the numerous mistakes made by Ottaviano Scoto in printing the _De Malo Medendi_ and the _De Consolatione_, he determined to go to another printer. [167] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 93. [168] Cardan notices the attack in these words--"His diebus quidam conscripserat adversus nostrum de Subtilitate librum, Opus ingens. Adversus quem ego Apologiam scripsi."--_Opera_, tom. i. p. 117. Scaliger absurdly calls his work the _fifteenth_ book of _Exercitations_, and wished the world to believe that he had written, though not printed, the fourteen others. [169] It was not printed until many years after the deaths of both disputants, and appeared for the first time in a volume of Scaliger's letters and speeches published at Toulouse in 1621, and it was afterwards affixed to the _De Vita Propria_.