The same author has another treatise on Mumia, every bit as fanciful and monstrous as the first. By its means he will cure most diseases and transfer them from a man to an animal, drawing blood from one and applying it to the other, “or divert the disease into a plant.” There is also an antidote of the kind Roger Bacon wrote about long ago in his treatise On Delaying Old Age, to make a man young again and let him live three or four hundred years. Besides these are universal remedies, martial amulets, weapon-salve, balsams, extraordinary extracts, elixirs, and similar magical and magnetic cures.

Now what could be more delightful than contemplating these things, reading about and examining such experiments? Or, if a man is more mathematically inclined, calculating or studying Napier’s Logarithms, or those tables of logarithmic sines and tangents recently published by my old college companion, good friend, and former fellow Student of Christ Church, Oxford, Mr Edmund Gunter? With addition and subtraction alone they accomplish what Regiomontanus’s tables formerly did by multiplication and division. Or he might study the elaborate practical results obtainable with Gunter’s sector, quadrant, and cross-staff.

Or let the melancholy man calculate spherical triangles, square a circle, or cast a birth horoscope. However some may condemn the last, I say with Garceus, “We shall concede this to adventurous minds”: we will allow it in some cases. Or let him compile an ephemeris, read the works of Suisset the Calculator, Scaliger’s On the Correction of Chronology and his opponent Petavius until he understands them; examine subtle Scotus and Suárez’s metaphysics, or scholastic theology—Ockham, Thomas, Entisberus, Durand, and the rest.

If these other subjects do not engage him, and his means are ample, he may go in search of the philosopher’s stone, to occupy his purse and fill his head. He may, I say, turn his mind to heraldry or antiquities; devise mottoes and emblems; compose wedding poems, epitaphs, elegies, epigrams, palindromic epigrams, anagrams, chronograms, and acrostics upon his friends’ names. Or he may write a commentary on Martianus Capella, Tertullian’s On the Mantle, the Nubian Geography, or Ælia Lælia Crispis, as many idle fellows have attempted.

And rather than do nothing, let him rearrange a verse a thousand ways with Putean, tormenting his wits in this fashion; or 2,150 times, like Rainnerius of Lüneburg in his Poetic Proteus, or as Scaliger, Chrysolithus, Cleppisius, and others have similarly done.

If such voluntary tasks—the pleasure and delight, or the difficulty, of these studies—will not divert their idle thoughts and turn their imaginations elsewhere, they must be compelled, says Christophorus à Vega: “They ought to be compelled,” book 5, chapter 14. Let some penalty attach to failure to perform a task “that falls to them as a duty”: loss of reputation or disgrace, as with our public university exercises.

For just as a man playing for no stakes will pay little attention to his game, so voluntary work will not fully absorb a student unless he is deeply intent of his own accord and takes extraordinary pleasure in his subject. His business should be such that, willing or unwilling, he must undertake it, and cannot neglect it without great loss, a penalty, shame, or disadvantage.

Now, for women, instead of laborious studies, there are elaborate needlework, cutwork, spinning, bobbin lace, and many pretty things of their own making to adorn their houses, cushions, carpets, chairs, and stools—“for she does not eat the bread of idleness,” Proverbs 31:27; “she sought wool and flax”—as well as confections, preserves, distilled preparations, and so forth, which they show to visitors.

She herself, partner and overseer of the work, freely shows it To visiting guests, bearing witness that her hours Have neither passed in idleness nor been lost to her.

She shows it to her guests, with all her treasures: “My maids did this much; but this I did myself.”

These things occupy them, along with household duties and the like: neat gardens full of exotic, many-coloured, richly varied, sweet-smelling flowers and plants of every kind, which they are eager to acquire, meticulous in preserving and tending, proud to possess, and often boast of.

I deliberately pass over their cheerful gatherings, frequent visits, and mutual invitations, so common in prosperous towns; the gossiping of the lower ranks, and so forth. Old people have their prayer beads: an excellent invention for keeping those who are naturally melancholy and past all business from idleness, by saying so many Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Creeds—if it were not profane and superstitious.

In a word, body and mind must both be exercised, and in moderation; otherwise great harm will follow. If the body is overtired, it tires the mind. The mind burdens the body, as often happens with students who, as Plutarch observes, take no care of the body but compel what is mortal to do as much as what is immortal, what is earthly as much as what is heavenly.

But the weary ox told the camel—both serving one master—who refused to carry some of his burden that before long he would be compelled to carry the whole pack and the ox’s hide into the bargain. And so it soon happened, when the ox died. The body may say the same to the soul that will give it no respite or relief: before long, a fever, vertigo, or wasting illness seizes them both; all study is abandoned, and they must be sick together. Whoever values his own welfare and health must let body and mind pull evenly under an equal yoke, so that they may happily enjoy the health they desire.