parts of the body, as if a spot be over the spleen; [1298]"or in the nails;
if it appear black, it signifieth much care, grief, contention, and
melancholy;" the reason he refers to the humours, and gives instance in
himself, that for seven years space he had such black spots in his nails,
and all that while was in perpetual lawsuits, controversies for his
inheritance, fear, loss of honour, banishment, grief, care, &c. and when
his miseries ended, the black spots vanished. Cardan, in his book _de
libris propriis_, tells such a story of his own person, that a little
before his son's death, he had a black spot, which appeared in one of his
nails; and dilated itself as he came nearer to his end. But I am over
tedious in these toys, which howsoever, in some men's too severe censures,
they may be held absurd and ridiculous, I am the bolder to insert, as not
borrowed from circumforanean rogues and gipsies, but out of the writings of
worthy philosophers and physicians, yet living some of them, and religious
professors in famous universities, who are able to patronise that which
they have said, and vindicate themselves from all cavillers and ignorant
persons.


SUBSECT. V.--_Old age a cause_.

Secondary peculiar causes efficient, so called in respect of the other
precedent, are either _congenitae, internae, innatae_, as they term them,
inward, innate, inbred; or else outward and adventitious, which happen to
us after we are born: congenite or born with us, are either natural, as old
age, or _praeter naturam_ (as [1299]Fernelius calls it) that
distemperature, which we have from our parent's seed, it being an
hereditary disease. The first of these, which is natural to all, and which
no man living can avoid, is [1300]old age, which being cold and dry, and of
the same quality as melancholy is, must needs cause it, by diminution of