Considering that this book covers to a great extent the same ground as its predecessor, Cardan must be credited with considerable ingenuity of treatment in presenting his supplementary work without an undue amount of repetition. In the _De Varietate_ he always contrives to bring forward some fresh fact or fancy to illustrate whatever section of the universe he may have under treatment, even though this section may have been already dealt with in the _De Subtilitate_. The characteristic most strongly marked in the later book is the increased eagerness with which he plunges into the investigation of certain forces, which he professes to appreciate as lying beyond Nature, and incapable of scientific verification in the modern sense, and the fabled manifestations of the same. He loses no opportunity of trying to peer behind the curtain, and of seeking--honestly enough--to formulate those various pseudo-sciences, politely called occult, which have now fallen into ridicule and disrepute with all except the charlatan and the dupe, who are always with us. Where he occupies in the _De Subtilitate_ one page in considering those things which lie outside Nature--demons, ghosts, incantations, succubi, incubi, divinations, and such like--he spends ten in the _De Varietate_ over kindred subjects. There is a wonderful story[121] told by his father of a ghost or demon which he saw in his youth while he was a scholar in the house of Giovanni Resta at Pavia. He searches the pages of Hector Boethius, Nicolaus Donis, Rugerus, Petrus Toletus, Leo Africanus, and other chroniclers of the marvellous, for tales of witchcraft, prodigies, and monstrous men and beasts, and devotes a whole chapter to chiromancy,[122] a subject with which he had occupied his plenteous leisure when he was waiting for patients at Sacco. The diagram of the human hand given by him does not differ greatly from that of the contemporary hand-books of the "Art," and the leading lines are just the same. The heavenly bodies are as potent here as in Horoscopy. The thumb is given to Mars, the index finger to Jupiter, the middle finger to Saturn, the ring finger to the Sun, and the little finger to Venus. Each finger-joint has its name, the lowest being called the procondyle, the middle the condyle, and the upper the metacondyle. He passes briefly over as lines of little import, the _via combusta_ and the _Cingulus Orionis_, but lays some stress on the character of the nails and the knitting together of the hand, declaring that hands which can be bent easily backward denote effeminacy or a rapacious spirit. He teaches that lines are most abundant in the hands of children, on account of the tenderness of the skin, and of old men on account of the dryness, a statement which might suggest the theory that lines come into existence through the opening and closing of the hand. But the adoption of this view would have proved more disastrous to chiromancy than ridicule or serious criticism;