Thus, while Christendom was still preoccupied with the Crusades, two main forces of the Renaissance, naturalism and enthusiasm for antique modes of feeling, already brought their latent potency to light, prematurely indeed and precociously, yet with a promise that was destined to be kept.
It is not quite certain whether these are to be regarded as the remnant of an earlier excretory system, replaced among the Oligochaeta by the subsequently developed paired structures, or whether these "head kidneys" are the first pair of nephridia precociously developed.
In this terrible school Ladislaus matured precociously.
Prematurely born at Buda on the ist of July 1506, it required all the resources of medical science to keep the sickly child alive, yet he developed so precociously that at the age of thirteen he was well bearded and moustached, while at eighteen his hair was silvery white.
The interference of the state with his education, when he was quite a child, was, however, doubly harmful, as his parents taught him to despise the preceptors imposed upon him by the diet, and the atmosphere of intrigue and duplicity in which he grew up made him precociously experienced in the art of dissimulation.