e of
any ghostly minister attendant upon himself. In the _De Subtilitate_ he
tells an experience of his own by way of suggesting that some of the
demons spoken of by the retailers of marvels might be figments of the
brain. In 1550 Cardan was called in to see a certain woman who had long
been troubled with an obscure disease of the bladder. Every known remedy
was tried in vain, when one day a certain Josephus Niger,[235] a
distinguished Greek scholar, went to see the patient. Niger, according to
Cardan's account, was quite ignorant of medicine, but he was reputed to be
a skilled master of magic arts. The woman had a son, a boy about ten years
old, and Josephus having handed him a three-cornered crystal, which he had
with him, bade the youth secretly to look into it, and then declare, in
his mother's hearing, that he could see in the crystal three very terrible
demons going on foot. Then, after Josephus had whispered certain other
words in the boy's ear, the boy went on to say that he beheld another
demon, vastly bigger than the first, riding on horseback and bearing in
his hand a three-tined fork. This monster overthrew the other demons, and
led them away captive, bound with chains to his saddlebow. After listening
to these words the woman rapidly got well, and Cardan, in commenting on
the event, declares that she must have been cured either by the agency of
the demons or by the force of the imagination, inasmuch as it would be
difficult, if not impossible, to invent any other reason of her
recovery.[236] In another passage of the _De Subtilitate_ he displays
judicious reserve in writing of Demons in general.[237]

During those terrible days, when his son had just died a felon's death,
and when he himself was haunted by the real dangers which beset him, and
almost maddened by the signs and tokens which seemed to tell of others to
come, the belief which Fazio his father had nourished easily found a
lodgment in his shaken and bewildered brain. In the _Dialogus de Humanis
Consiliis_, one of the speakers tells of a certain man who is clearly
meant to be Cardan himself. The speaker goes on to say that he is sure
this man is attended by a genius, which manifested itself to him somewhat
late in his life. "Aforetime, indeed, it had been wont to convey to him
warnings in dreams and by certain noises. What greater proof of his power
could there be than the cure of this man, without the use of drugs, of an
intestinal rupture on the