Note 22 — PRÉFACE À MON FILS. THE PREFACE OF MICHAEL NOSTRADAMUS TO HIS PROPHECIES.

Lymphatics, Garencières (p. 16) tells, were anciently those who were mad for love; and he absurdly adds that the sign of it was, that such persons threw themselves into the water,—lympha meaning water. Varro says that in Greece those who were mad were called νυμφολήπτους, which means caught by nymphs. Festus, to fit this, thinks that men went mad by seeing the image of nymphs in the water fountains. Others have it that they were afraid of water, as if it were hydrophobia that possessed them. But nympha and lympha approach each other so nearly, that when a man is once caught by a nymph he is, for the time being, mad to all intents and purposes,—“it is not given to a man to love and to be wise.” Leaving all this to be settled as it may, there is no question but in the medical technology of Nostradamus a deep melancholy is what was understood by the Lymphatic motion,—melancholy being the temperament most apt for study, poetry, and vaticination. Garencières invents a word for the occasion, or uses one that has since grown obsolete. He employs the verb lymphatize.