The first of these questions was easily disposed of by Sennertus, one of the most eminent Professors and practitioners of the medical science in that age. Facts he said, which were attested by trust-worthy authors, were not to be disputed. Many were the impudent falsehoods which this great and in other respects wise man, received implicitly as facts conformably to the maxim which he thus laid down; and many were the perilous consequences which he deduced in good faith, and on fair reasoning from such premises. Upon this occasion he instanced the case of a countryman, who at certain periods of the moon used to compose Latin verses, though he knew not a word of Latin at any other time. And of a man who spoke languages which he had never learnt, and became unable to speak any one of them as soon as he was restored to health by the effect of some powerful worm-medicines. And of a sailor's son, who being wounded in the head and becoming delirious in consequence, made perfect syllogisms in German, but as soon as his wound was healed, lost all the logic which had been beaten into his head in so extraordinary a way. Antonius Guainerius, who vouched for one of these cases as having witnessed the fact and all its circumstances, accounted for it by a brave hypothesis. The soul, he said, before its infusion into the body, possesses a knowledge of all things, and that knowledge is, in a certain manner, obliterated, or offuscated by its union with the body; but it is restored either by the ordinary means of instruction or by the influence of the star which presided at the time of its union. The body, and the bodily senses resist this influence, but when these are as it were bound, or suspended, _quod fiat in melancholia_, the stars can then impart their influences to the soul without obstruction, and the soul may thus be endowed with the power of effecting what the stars themselves effect, and thus an illiterate person may become learned, and may also predict events that are to come. Sennertus is far from assenting to this theory. He says “_Magna petita sunt quæ præsupponit et sibi concedi postulat Guainerius._”