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Title: Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study

Author: W. G. Waters

Release date: October 22, 2006 [eBook #19600]

Language: English

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JEROME CARDAN

JEROME CARDAN

A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY
BY

W.G. WATERS
"To be content that times to come should only know there was such a man,
not caring whether they knew more of him, was a frigid ambition in
Cardan."—Sir Thomas Browne.

LAWRENCE & BULLEN, Limited,
16 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London,
mdcccxcviii.

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
London & Bungay.

PREFACE
No attempt is made in the following pages to submit to historical treatment
the vast and varied mass of printed matter which Cardan left as his
contribution to letters and science, except in the case of those works which
are, in purpose or incidentally, autobiographical, or of those which furnish
in themselves effective contributions towards the framing of an estimate of
the genius and character of the writer. Neither has it seemed worth while to
offer to the public another biography constructed on the lines of the one
brought out by Professor Henry Morley in 1854, for the reason that the
circumstances of Cardan's life, the character of his work, and of the times in
which he lived, all appeared to be susceptible of more succinct and
homogeneous treatment than is possible in a chronicle of the passing years,
and of the work that each one saw accomplished. At certain junctures the
narrative form is inevitable, but an attempt has been made to treat the more
noteworthy episodes of Cardan's life and work, and the contemporary
aspect of the republic of letters, in relation to existing tendencies and
conditions, whenever such a course has seemed possible.
Professor Morley's book, The Life of Girolamo Cardano, of Milan,
physician, has been for some time out of print. This industrious writer
gathered together a large quantity of material, dealing almost as fully with
the more famous of the contemporary men of mark, with whom Cardan was
brought into contact, as with Cardan himself. The translations and analyses
of some of Cardan's more popular works which Professor Morley gives are
admirable in their way, but the space they occupy in the biography is
somewhat excessive. Had sufficient leisure for revision and condensation
been allowed, Professor Morley's book would have taken a high place in
biographical literature. As it stands it is a noteworthy performance; and, by
reason of its wide and varied stores of information and its excellent index, it
must always prove a valuable magazine of mémoires pour servir for any
future students who may be moved to write afresh, concerning the life and
work of the great Milanese physician.

An apology may be needed for the occurrence here and there of passages
translated from the De Vita Propria and the De Utilitate ex Adversis
capienda, passages which some readers may find too frequent and too
lengthy, but contemporary opinion is strongly in favour of letting the
subject speak for himself as far as may be possible. The date and place of
Cardan's quoted works are given in the first citation therefrom; those of his
writings which have not been available in separate form have been
consulted in the collected edition of his works in ten volumes, edited by
Spon, and published at Lyons in 1663.
The author desires to acknowledge with gratitude the valuable assistance in
the way of suggestion and emendation which he received from Mr. R.C.
Christie during the final revision of the proofs.
London, October 1898.

JEROME CARDAN

CHAPTER I
Like certain others of the illustrious personages who flourished in his time,
Girolamo Cardano, or, as he has become to us by the unwritten law of
nomenclature, Jerome Cardan, was fated to suffer the burden and obloquy
of bastardy.[1] He was born at Pavia from the illicit union of Fazio Cardano,
a Milanese jurisconsult and mathematician of considerable repute, and a
young widow, whose maiden name had been Chiara Micheria, his father
being fifty-six, and his mother thirty-seven years of age at his birth. The
family of Fazio was settled at Gallarate, a town in Milanese territory, and
was one which, according to Jerome's contention, could lay claim to
considerable antiquity and distinction. He prefers a claim of descent from
the house of Castillione, founding the same upon an inscription on the apse
of the principal church at Gallarate.[2] He asserts that as far back as 1189
Milo Cardano was Governor of Milan for more than seven years, and
according to tradition Franco Cardano, the commander of the forces of
Matteo Visconti,[3] was a member of the family. If the claim of the
Castillione ancestry be allowed the archives of the race would be still
farther enriched by the name of Pope Celestine IV., Godfrey of Milan, who
was elected Pope in 1241, and died the same year.
Cardan's immediate ancestors were long-lived. The sons of Fazio Cardano,
his great-grandfather, Joanni, Aldo, and Antonio, lived to be severally
ninety-four, eighty-eight, and eighty-six years of age. Of these Joanni begat
two sons: Antonio, who lived eighty-eight years, and Angelo, who reached
the age of eighty-six. To Aldo were born Jacopo, who died at seventy-two;
Gottardo, who died at eighty-four; and Fazio, the father of Jerome, who
died at eighty.[4]
Fazio, albeit he came of such a long-lived stock, and lived himself to be
fourscore, suffered much physical trouble during his life. On account of a
wound which he had received when he was a youth, some of the bones of
his skull had to be removed, and from this time forth he never dared to
remain long with his head uncovered. When he was fifty-nine he swallowed
a certain corrosive poison, which did not kill him, but left him toothless. He

was likewise round-shouldered, a stammerer, and subject to constant
palpitation of the heart; but in compensation for these defects he had eyes
which could see in the dark and which needed not spectacles even in
advanced age.
Of Jerome's mother little is known. Her family seems to have been as
tenacious of life as that of Fazio, for her father Jacopo lived to be seventy-
five years of age. Of his maternal grandfather Jerome remarks that he was a
highly skilled mathematician, and that when he was about seventy years of
age, he was cast into prison for some offence against the law. He speaks of
his mother as choleric in temper, well dowered with memory and mental
parts, small in stature and fat, and of a pious disposition,[5] and declares that
she and his father were alike in one respect, to wit that they were easily
moved to anger and were wont to manifest but lukewarm and intermittent
affection for their child. Nevertheless they were in a way indulgent to him.
His father permitted him to remain in bed till the second hour of the day had
struck, or rather forbade him to rise before this time—an indulgence which
worked well for the preservation of his health. He adds that in after times he
always thought of his father as possessing the kindlier nature of the two.[6]
It would seem from the passage above written, as well as from certain
others subsequent, that Jerome had little affection for his mother; and albeit
he neither chides nor reproaches her, he never refers to her in terms so
appreciative and loving as those which he uses in lamenting the death of his
harsh and tyrannical father. In the Geniturarum Exempla[7] he says that,
seeing he is writing of a woman, he will confine his remarks to saying that
she was ingenious, of good parts, generous, upright, and loving towards her
children. Perhaps the fact that his father died early, while his mother lived
on for many years, and was afterwards a member of his household—
together with his wife—may account for the colder tone of his remarks
while writing about her. She was the widow of a certain Antonio Alberio,[8]
and during her marriage had borne him three children, Tommaso, Catilina,
and Joanni Ambrogio; but when Jerome was a year old all three of these
died of the plague within the space of a few weeks.[9] He himself narrowly
escaped death from the same cause, and this attack he attributes to an
inherited tendency from his mother, she having suffered from the same

disease during her girlhood. There seems to have been born to Fazio and
Chiara another son, who died at birth.[10]
Jerome Cardan was born on September 24, 1501, between half-past six
o'clock and a quarter to seven in the evening. In the second chapter of his
autobiography he gives the year as 1500, and in De Utilitate, p. 347, he
writes the date as September 23, but on all other occasions the date first
written is used. Before he saw the light malefic influences were at work
against him. His mother, urged on no doubt by the desire to conceal her
shame, and persuaded by evil counsellors, drank a potion of abortive drugs
in order to produce miscarriage,[11] but Nature on this occasion was not to
be baulked. In recording the circumstances of his birth he writes at some
length in the jargon of astrology to show how the celestial bodies were
leagued together so as to mar him both in body and mind. "Wherefore I
ought, according to every rule, to have been born a monster, and, under the
circumstances, it was no marvel that it was found necessary to tear me from
the womb in order to bring me into the world. Thus was I born, or rather
dragged from my mother's body. I was to all outward seeming dead, with
my head covered with black curly hair. I was brought round by being
plunged in a bath of heated wine, a remedy which might well have proved
hurtful to any other infant. My mother lay three whole days in labour, but at
last gave birth to me, a living child."[12]
The sinister influences of the stars soon began to manifest their power.
Before Jerome had been many days in the world the woman into whose
charge he had been given was seized with the plague and died the same day,
whereupon his mother took him home with her. The first of his bodily
ailments,—the catalogue of the same which he subsequently gives is indeed
a portentous one,[13]—was an eruption of carbuncles on the face in the form
of a cross, one of the sores being set on the tip of the nose; and when these
disappeared, swellings came. Before the boy was two months old his
godfather, Isidore di Resta of Ticino, gave him into the care of another
nurse who lived at Moirago, a town about seven miles from Milan, but here
again ill fortune attended him. His body began to waste and his stomach to
swell because the nurse who gave him suck was herself pregnant.[14] A third
foster-mother was found for him, and he remained with her till he was
weaned in his third year.

When he was four years of age he was taken to Milan to be under the care
of his mother, who, with her sister, Margarita, was living in Fazio's house;
but whether she was at this time legally married to him or not there is no
evidence to show. In recording this change he remarks that he now came
under a gentler discipline from the hands of his mother and his aunt, but
immediately afterwards proclaims his belief that the last-named must have
been born without a gall bladder, a remark somewhat difficult to apply,
seeing he frequently complains afterwards of her harshness. It must be
remembered, however, that these details are taken from a record of the
writer's fifth year set down when he was past seventy.[15] He quotes certain
lapses from kindly usage, as for instance when it happened that he was
beaten by his father or his mother without a cause. After much chastisement
he always fell sick, and lay some time in mortal danger. "When I was seven
years old my father and my mother were then living apart—my kinsfolk
determined, for some reason or other, to give over beating me, though
perchance a touch of the whip might then have done me no harm. But ill-
fortune was ever hovering around me; she let my tribulation take a different
shape, but she did not remove it. My father, having hired a house, took me
and my mother and my aunt to live with him, and made me always
accompany him in his rounds about the city. On this account I, being taken
at this tender age with my weak body from a life of absolute rest and put to
hard and constant work, was seized at the beginning of my eighth year with
dysentery and fever, an ailment which was at that time epidemic in our city.
Moreover I had eaten by stealth a vast quantity of sour grapes. But after I
had been visited by the physicians, Bernabo della Croce and Angelo Gyra,
there seemed to be some hope of my recovery, albeit both my parents, and
my aunt as well, had already bewept me as one dead.
"At this season my father, who was at heart a man of piety, was minded to
invoke the divine assistance of San Girolamo (commending me to the care
of the Saint in his prayers) rather than trust to the working of that familiar
spirit which, as he was wont to declare openly, was constantly in attendance
upon him. The reason of this change in his treatment of me I never cared to
inquire. It was during the time of my recovery from this sickness, that the
French celebrated their triumph after defeating the Venetians on the banks
of the Adda, which spectacle I was allowed to witness from my window.[16]
After this my father freed me of the task of going with him on his rounds.

But the anger of Juno was not yet exhausted; for, before I had fully
recovered my health, I fell down-stairs (we were then living in the Via dei
Maini), with a hammer in my hand, and by this accident I hurt the left side
of my forehead, injuring the bone and causing a scar which remains to this
day. Before I had recovered from this mishap I was sitting on the threshold
of the house when a stone, about as long and as broad as a nut, fell down
from the top of a high house next door and wounded my head just where
my hair grew very thickly on the left side.
"At the beginning of my tenth year my father changed this house, which
had proved a very unlucky one for me, for another in the same street, and
there I abode for three whole years. But my ill luck still followed me, for
my father once more caused me to go about with him as his famulus, and
would never allow me on any pretext to escape this task. I should hesitate to
say that he did this through cruelty; for, taking into consideration what
ensued, you may perchance be brought to see that this action of his came to
pass rather through the will of Heaven than through any failing of his own. I
must add too that my mother and my aunt were fully in agreement with him
in his treatment of me. In after times, however, he dealt with me in much
milder fashion, for he took to live with him two of his nephews, wherefore
my own labour was lessened by the amount of service he exacted from
these. Either I did not go out at all, or if we all went out together the task
was less irksome.
"When I had completed my sixteenth year—up to which time I served my
father constantly—we once more changed our house, and dwelt with
Alessandro Cardano next door to the bakery of the Bossi. My father had
two other nephews, sons of a sister of his, one named Evangelista, a
member of the Franciscan Order, and nearly seventy years of age, and the
other Otto Cantone, a farmer of the taxes, and very rich. The last-named,
before he died, wished to leave me his sole heir; but this my father forbad,
saying that Otto's wealth had been ill gotten; wherefore the estate was
distributed according to the directions of the surviving brother."[17]
This, told as nearly as may be in his own words, is the story of Cardan's
birth and childhood and early discipline, a discipline ill calculated to let him
grow up to useful and worthy manhood. It must have been a wretched
spring of life. Many times he refers to the hard slavery he underwent in the

days when he was forced to carry his father's bag about the town, and tells
how he had to listen to words of insult cast at his mother's name.[18] Like
most boys who lead solitary lives, unrelieved by the companionship of
other children, he was driven in upon himself, and grew up into a fanciful
imaginative youth, a lover of books rather than of games, with an old head
upon his young shoulders. After such a training it was only natural that he
should be transformed from a nervous hysterical child into an embittered,
cross-grained man, profligate and superstitious at the same time. Abundant
light is thrown upon every stage of his career, for few men have left a
clearer picture of themselves in their written words, and nowhere is Cardan,
from the opening to the closing scene, so plainly exhibited as in the De Vita
Propria, almost the last work which came from his pen. It has been asserted
that this book, written in the twilight of senility by an old man with his
heart cankered by misfortune and ill-usage, and his brain upset by the dread
of real or fancied assaults of foes who lay in wait for him at every turn, is
no trustworthy guide, even when bare facts are in question, and
undoubtedly it would be undesirable to trust this record without seeking
confirmation elsewhere. This confirmation is nearly always at hand, for
there is hardly a noteworthy event in his career which he does not refer to
constantly in the more autobiographic of his works. The De Vita Propria is
indeed ill arranged and full of inconsistencies, but in spite of its
imperfections, it presents its subject as clearly and effectively as Benvenuto
Cellini is displayed in his own work. The rough sketch of a great master
often performs its task more thoroughly than the finished painting, and
Cardan's autobiography is a fragment of this sort. It lets pass in order of
procession the moody neglected boy in Fazio's ill-ordered house, the
student at Pavia, the youthful Rector of the Paduan Gymnasium, plunging
when just across the threshold of life into criminal excess of Sardanapalean
luxury, the country doctor at Sacco and afterwards at Gallarate, starving
amongst his penniless patients, the University professor, the famous
physician for whose services the most illustrious monarchs in Europe came
as suppliants in vain, the father broken by family disgrace and calamity, and
the old man, disgraced and suspected and harassed by persecutors who shot
their arrows in the dark, but at the same time tremblingly anxious to set
down the record of his days before the night should descend.

Until he had completed his nineteenth year Jerome continued to dwell under
the roof which for the time being might give shelter to his parents. The
emoluments which Fazio drew from his profession were sufficient for the
family wants—he himself being a man of simple tastes; wherefore Jerome
was not forced, in addition to his other youthful troubles, to submit to that
execrata paupertas and its concomitant miseries which vexed him in later
years. To judge from his conduct in the matter of Otto Cantone's estate,
Fazio seems to have been as great a despiser of wealth as his son proved to
be afterwards. His virtue, such as it was, must have been the outcome of
one of those hard cold natures, with wants few and trifling, and none of
those tastes which cry out daily for some new toy, only to be procured by
money. The fact that he made his son run after him through the streets of
Milan in place of a servant is not a conclusive proof of avarice; it may just
as likely mean that the old man was indifferent and callous to whatever
suffering he might inflict upon his young son, and indisposed to trouble
himself about searching for a hireling to carry his bag. The one indication
we gather of his worldly wisdom is his dissatisfaction that his son was
firmly set to follow medicine rather than jurisprudence, a step which would
involve the loss of the stipend of one hundred crowns a year which he drew
for his lectureship, an income which he had hoped might be continued to a
son of his after his death.[19]
Amidst the turmoil and discomfort of what must at the best have been a
most ill-regulated household, the boy's education was undertaken by his
father in such odds and ends of time as he might find to spare for the task.
[20]
What with the hardness and irritability of the teacher, and the
peevishness inseparable from the pupil's physical feebleness and morbid
overwrought mental habit, these hours of lessons must have been irksome
to both, and of little benefit. "In the meantime my father taught me orally
the Latin tongue as well as the rudiments of Arithmetic, Geometry, and
Astrology. But he allowed me to sleep well into the day, and he himself
would always remain abed till nine o'clock. But one habit of his appeared to
me likely to lead to grave consequences, to wit the way he had of lending to
others anything which belonged to him. Part of these loans, which were
made to insolvents, he lost altogether; and the residue, lent to divers persons
in high places, could only be recovered with much trouble and no little
danger, and with loss of all interest on the same. I know not whether he

acted in this wise by the advice of that familiar spirit[21] whose services he
retained for eight-and-thirty years. What afterwards came to pass showed
that my father treated me, his son, rightly in all things relating to education,
seeing that I had a keen intelligence. For with boys of this sort it is well to
make use of the bit as though you were dealing with mules. Beyond this he
was witty and diverting in his conversation, and given to the telling of
stories and strange occurrences well worth notice. He told me many things
about familiar spirits, but what part of these were true I know not; but
assuredly tales of this sort, wonderful in themselves and artfully put
together, delighted me marvellously.
"But what chiefly deserved condemnation in my father was that he brought
up certain other youths with the intention of leaving to them his goods in
case I should die; which thing, in sooth, meant nothing less than the
exposure of myself to open danger through plots of the parents of the boys
aforesaid, on account of the prize offered. Over this affair my father and my
mother quarrelled grievously, and finally decided to live apart. Whereupon
my mother, stricken by this mental vexation, and troubled at intervals with
what I deem to have been an hysterical affection, fell one day full on the
back of her neck, and struck her head upon the floor, which was composed
of tiles. It was two or three hours before she came round, and indeed her
recovery was little short of miraculous, especially as at the end of her
seizure she foamed much at the mouth.
"In the meantime I altered the whole drift of this tragedy by a pretended
adoption of the religious life, for I became for a time a member of the
mendicant Franciscan brotherhood. But at the beginning of my twenty-first
year[22] I went to the Gymnasium at Pavia, whereupon my father, feeling
my absence, was softened towards me, and a reconciliation between him
and my mother took place.
"Before this time I had learnt music, my mother and even my father having
secretly given me money for the same; my father likewise paid for my
instruction in dialectics. I became so proficient in this art that I taught it to
certain other youths before I went to the University. Thus he sent me there
endowed with the means of winning an honest living; but he never once
spake a word to me concerning this matter, bearing himself always towards
me in considerate, kindly, and pious wise.

"For the residue of his days (and he lived on well-nigh four more years) his
life was a sad one, as if he would fain let it be known to the world how
much he loved me.[23] Moreover, when by the working of fate I returned
home while he lay sick, he besought, he commanded, nay he even forced
me, all unwilling, to depart thence, what though he knew his last hour was
nigh, for the reason that the plague was in the city, and he was fain that I
should put myself beyond danger from the same. Even now my tears rise
when I think of his goodwill towards me. But, my father, I will do all the
justice I can to thy merit and to thy paternal care; and, as long as these
pages may be read, so long shall thy name and thy virtues be celebrated. He
was a man not to be corrupted by any offering whatsoever, and indeed a
saint. But I myself was left after his death involved in many lawsuits,
having nothing clearly secured except one small house."[24]
Fazio contracted a close intimacy with a certain Galeazzo Rosso, a man
clever as a smith, and endowed with mechanical tastes which no doubt
helped to secure him Fazio's friendship. Galeazzo discovered the principle
of the water-screw of Archimedes before the description of the same,
written in the books of the inventor, had been published. He also made
swords which could be bent as if they were of lead, and sharp enough to cut
iron like wood. He performed a more wonderful feat in fashioning iron
breast-plates which would resist the impact of red-hot missiles. In the De
Sapientia, Cardan records that when Galeazzo perfected his water-screw, he
lost his wits for joy.

Fazio took no trouble to teach his son Latin,[25] though the learned language
would have been just as necessary for the study of jurisprudence as for any
other liberal calling, and Jerome did not begin to study it systematically till
he was past nineteen years of age. Through some whim or prejudice the old
man refused for some time to allow the boy to go to the University, and
when at last he gave his consent he still fought hard to compel Jerome to
qualify himself in jurisprudence; but here he found himself at issue with a
will more stubborn than his own. Cardan writes: "From my earliest youth I
let every action of mine be regulated in view of the after course of my life,
and I deemed that as a career medicine would serve my purpose far better
than law, being more appropriate for the end I had in view, of greater
interest to the world at large, and likely to last as long as time itself. At the

same time I regarded it as a study which embodied the nobler principles,
and rested upon the ground of reason (that is upon the eternal laws of
Nature) rather than upon the sanction of human opinion. On this account I
took up medicine rather than jurisprudence, nay I almost entirely cast aside,
or even fled from the company of those friends of mine who followed the
law, rejecting at the same time wealth and power and honour. My father,
when he heard that I had abandoned the study of law to follow philosophy,
wept in my presence, and grieved amain that I would not settle down to the
study of his own subject. He deemed it the more salutary discipline—proofs
of which opinion he would often bring forward out of Aristotle—that it was
better adapted for the acquisition of power and riches; and that it would
help me more efficiently in restoring the fortunes of our house. He
perceived moreover that the office of teaching in the schools of the city,
together with its accompanying salary of a hundred crowns which he had
enjoyed for so many years, would not be handed on to me, as he had hoped,
and he saw that a stranger would succeed to the same. Nor was that
commentary of his destined ever to see the light or to be illustrated by my
notes. Earlier in life he had nourished a hope that his name might become
illustrious as the emendator of the 'Commentaries of John, Archbishop of
Canterbury on Optics and Perspective.'[26] Indeed the following verses were
printed thereanent:

'Hoc Cardana viro gaudet domus: omnia novit
Unus: habent nullum saecula nostra parem.'

"These words may be taken as a sort of augury referring rather to certain
other men about to set forth to do their work in the world, than to my father,
who, except in the department of jurisprudence (of which indeed rumour
says that he was a master), never let his mind take in aught that was new.
The rudiments of mathematics were all that he possessed, and he gathered
no fresh knowledge from the store-houses of Greek learning. This
disposition in him was probably produced by the vast multitude of subjects
to be mastered, and by his infirmity of purpose, rather than by any lack of
natural parts, or by idleness or by defect of judgment; vices to which he was
in no way addicted. But I, being firmly set upon the object of my wishes,
for the reasons given above, and because I perceived that my father had

achieved only moderate success—though he had encountered but few
hindrances—remained unconvinced by any of his exhortations."[27]

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Bayle is unwilling to admit Cardan's illegitimate birth. In De Consolatione,
Opera, tom. i. p. 619 (Lyons, 1663), Cardan writes in reference to the action of
the Milanese College of Physicians: "Medicorum collegium, suspitione obortâ,
quòd (tam malè à patre tractatus) spurius essem, repellebat." Bayle apparently
had not read the De Consolatione, as he quotes the sentence as the work of a
modern writer, and affirms that the word "suspitio" would not have been used
had the fact been notorious. But in the Dialogus de Morte, Opera, tom. i. p. 676,
Cardan declares that his father openly spoke of him as a bastard.
[2] De Utilitate ex adversis Capienda (Franeker, 1648), p. 357.
[3] Matteo Visconti was born in 1250, and died in 1322. He was lord of Novara
Vercello Como and Monferrato, and was made Vicar Imperial by Adolphus of
Nassau. Though he was worsted in his conflict with John XXII. he did much to
lay the foundations of his family.
[4] De Vita Propria (Amsterdam, 1654), ch. i. p. 4.
[5] Cardan makes a statement in De Consolatione, Opera, tom. i. p. 605, which
indicates that her disposition was not a happy one. "Matrem meam Claram
Micheriam, juvenem vidi, cum admodum puer essem, meminique hanc dicere
solitam, Utinam si Deo placuisset, extincta forem in infantia."
[6] De Vita Propria, ch. i. p. 4.
[7] Geniturarum Exempla (Basil, 1554), p. 436.
[8] De Rerum Varietate (Basil, 1557), p. 655.
[9] De Utilitate, p. 347. There is a passage in Geniturarum Exempla, p. 435,
dealing with Fazio's horoscope, which may be taken to mean that these children
were his. "Alios habuisse filios qui obierint ipsa genitura demōstrat, me solo diu
post etiā illius mortē superstite."
[10] With regard to the union of his parents he writes: "Uxorem vix duxit ob
Lunam afflictam et eam in senectute."—Geniturarum Exempla, p. 435.
[11] "Igitur ut ab initio exordiar, in pestilentia conceptus, matrem, nondum natus
(ut puto) mearum calamitatum participem, profugam habui."—Opera, tom. i. p.
618.
"Mater ut abortiret medicamentum abortivum dum in utero essem, alieno
mandato bibit."—De Utilitate, p. 347.
[12] De Vita Propria, ch. ii. p. 6.

[13] In one passage, De Utilitate, p. 348, he sums up his physical misfortunes:
"Hydrope, febribus, aliisque morbis conflictatus sum, donec sub fine octavi anni
ex dysenteria ac febre usque ad mortis limina perveni, pulsavi ostium sed non
aperuere qui intro erant."
[14] "Inde lac praegnantis hausi per varias nutrices lactatus ac jactatus."—De
Utilitate, p. 348.
[15] The De Vita Propria, the chief authority for these remarks, was written by
Cardan in Rome shortly before his death.
[16] The illness would have occurred about October 1508, and the victory of the
Adda was on May 14, 1509. This fact fixes his birth in 1501, and shows that his
illness must have lasted six or seven months.
[17] De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. ii.
[18] Opera, tom. i. p. 676.
[19] "Quod munus profitendi institutiones in urbe ipsa cum honorario centum
coronatorum, quo jam tot annis gaudebat, non in me (ut speraverat) transiturum
intelligebat."—De Vita Propria, ch. x. p. 35.
[20] "Pater jam antè concesserat ut Geometriæ et Dialecticæ operam darem, in
quo (quanquam præter paucas admonitiones, librosque, ac licentiam, nullum
aliud auxilium præbuerit) eas tamen ego (succicivis temporibus studens) interim
feliciter sum assecutus."—De Consolatione, Opera, tom. i. p. 619.
[21] "Facius Cardanus dæmonem ætherium, ut ipse dicebat, diu familiarem
habuit; qui quamdiu conjuratione usus est, vera illi dabat responsa, cùm autem
illam exussisset, veniebat quidem, sed responsa falsa dabat. Tenuit igitur annis,
ni fallor, vinginti octo cum conjuratione, solutum autem circiter quinque."—De
Varietate, p. 629.
In the Dialogus Tetim (Opera, tom. i. p. 672), Cardan writes: "Pater honeste obiit
et ex senio, sed multo antea eum Genius ille reliquerat."
[22] There is a discrepancy between this date and the one given in De Vita
Propria, ch. iv. p. 11. "Anno exacto XIX contuli me in Ticinensem Academiam."
[23] "Inde (desiderium augente absentiâ) mortuus est, sæviente peste, cùm
primum me diligere cœpisset."—De Consolatione, Opera, tom. i. p. 619.
[24] De Utilitate, p. 348.
[25] "Nimis satis fuit defuisse tot, memoriam, linguam Latinam per
adolescentiam."—De Vita Propria, ch. li. p. 218.
[26] John Peckham was a Franciscan friar, and was nominated to the see of
Canterbury by Nicholas III. in 1279. He had spent much time in the convent of
his Order at Oxford, and there is a legend connecting him with a Johannes
Juvenis or John of London, a youth who had attracted the attention and
benevolence of Roger Bacon. This Johannes became one of the first
mathematicians and opticians of the age, and was sent to Rome by Bacon, who
entrusted to him the works which he was sending to Pope Clement IV. There is

no reason for this view beyond the fact that both were called John, and
distinguished in the same branches of learning. The Perspectiva Communis was
his principal work; it does not deal with perspective as now understood, but with
elementary propositions of optics. It was first printed in Milan in or about 1482.
[27] De Vita Propria, ch. x. p. 34. A remark in De Sapientia, Opera, tom. i. p.
578, suggests that Fazio began life as a physician: "Pater meus Facius Cardanus
Medicus primò, inde Jurisconsultus factus est."

CHAPTER II
The University of Pavia to which Jerome now betook himself was by
tradition one of the learned foundations of Charlemagne.[28] It had certainly
enjoyed a high reputation all through the Middle Ages, and had recently had
the honour of numbering Laurentius Valla amongst its professors. In 1362,
Galeazzo Visconti had obtained a charter for it from the Emperor Charles
IV., and that it had become a place of consequence in 1400 is proved by the
fact that, besides maintaining several professors in the Canon Law, it
supported thirteen in Civil Law, five in Medicine, three in Philosophy, and
one each in Astrology, Greek, and Eloquence. Like all the other Universities
of Northern Italy, it suffered occasional eclipse or even extinction on
account of the constant war and desolation which vexed these parts almost
without intermission during the years following the formation of the League
of Cambrai. Indeed, as recently as 1500, the famous library collected by
Petrarch, and presented by Gian Galeazzo Visconti to the University, was
carried off by the French.[29]
To judge from the pictures which the Pavian student, writing in after years,
gives of his physical self, it may be inferred that he was ill-endowed by the
Graces. "I am of middle height. My chest is somewhat narrow and my arms
exceedingly thin: my right hand is the more grossly fashioned of the two, so
that a chiromantist might have set me down as rude or doltish: indeed,
should such an one examine my hand, he would be ashamed to say what he
thought. In it the line of life is short, and that named after Saturn long and
well marked. My left hand, however, is seemly, with fingers long, tapering,
and well-set, and shining nails. My neck is longer and thinner than the rule,
my chin is divided, my lower lip thick and pendulous, my eyes are very
small, and it is my wont to keep them half-closed, peradventure lest I
should discern things over clearly. My forehead is wide and bare of hair
where it meets the temples. My hair and beard are both of them yellow in
tint, and both as a rule kept close cut. My chin, which as I have said already
is marked by a division, is covered in its lower part with a thick growth of
long hair. My habit is to speak in a highly-pitched voice, so that my friends

sometimes rebuke me thereanent; but, harsh and loud as is my voice, it
cannot be heard at any great distance while I am lecturing. I am wont to talk
too much, and in none too urbane a tone. The look of my eyes is fixed, like
that of one in deep thought. My front teeth are large, and my complexion
red and white: the form of my countenance being somewhat elongated, and
my head is finished off in narrow wise at the back, like to a small sphere.
Indeed, it was no rare thing for the painters, who came from distant
countries to paint my portrait, to affirm that they could find no special
characteristic which they could use for the rendering of my likeness, so that
I might be known by the same."[30]
After giving this account of his person, Cardan writes down a catalogue of
the various diseases which vexed him from time to time, a chapter of
autobiography which looks like a transcript from a dictionary of Nosology.
More interesting is the sketch which he makes of his mental state during
these early years. Boys brought up in company of their elders often show a
tendency to introspection, and fall into a dreamy whimsical mood, and his
case is a striking example. "By the command of my father I used to lie abed
until nine o'clock,[31] and, if perchance I lay awake any time before the
wonted hour of rising, it was my habit to spend the same by conjuring up to
sight all sorts of pleasant visions, nor can I remember that I ever summoned
these in vain. I used to behold figures of divers kinds like airy bodies.
Meseemed they were made up of tiny rings, like those in coats of chain-
armour, though at this time I had seen nought of the kind. They would rise
at the bottom of the bed, from the right-hand corner; and, moving in a semi-
circle, would pass slowly on and disappear in the left. Moreover I beheld
the shapes of castles and houses, of horses and riders, of plants, trees,
musical instruments, theatres, dresses of men of all sorts, and flute-players
who seemed to be playing upon their instruments, but neither voice nor
sound was heard therefrom. And besides these things I beheld soldiers, and
crowds of men, and fields, and certain bodily forms, which seem hateful to
me even now: groves and forests, and divers other things which I now
forget. In all this I took no small delight, and with straining eyes I would
gaze upon these marvels; wherefore my Aunt Margaret asked me more than
once whether I saw anything. I, though I was then only a child, deliberated
over this question of hers before I replied, saying to myself: 'If I tell her the
facts she will be wroth at the thing—whatever it may be—which is the

cause of these phantasms, and will deprive me of this delight.' And then I
seemed to see flowers of all kinds, and four-footed beasts, and birds; but all
these, though they were fashioned most beautifully, were lacking in colour,
for they were things of air. Therefore I, who neither as a boy nor as an old
man ever learned to lie, stood silent for some time. Then my aunt said
—'Boy, what makes you stare thus and stand silent?' I know not what
answer I made, but I think I said nothing at all. In my dreams I frequently
saw what seemed to be a cock, which I feared might speak to me in a
human voice. This in sooth came to pass later on, and the words it spake
were threatening ones, but I cannot now recall what I may have heard on
these occasions."[32]
With a brain capable of such remarkable exercises as the above-written
vision, living his life in an atmosphere of books, and with all games and
relaxations dear to boys of his age denied to him, it was no marvel that
Jerome should make an early literary essay on his own account. The death
of a young kinsman, Niccolo Cardano,[33] suggested to him a theme which
he elaborated in a tract called De immortalitate paranda, a work which
perished unlamented by its author, and a little later he wrote a treatise on the
calculation of the distances between the various heavenly bodies.[34] But he
put his mathematical skill to other and more sinister uses than this; for,
having gained practical experience at the gaming-tables, he combined this
experience with his knowledge of the properties of numbers, and wrote a
tract on games of chance. Afterwards he amplified this into his book, Liber
de Ludo Aleæ.
With this equipment and discipline Jerome went to Pavia in 1520. He found
lodging in the house of Giovanni Ambrogio Targio, and until the end of his
twenty-first year he spent all his time between Pavia and Milan. By this
date he had made sufficiently good use of his time to let the world see of
what metal he was formed, for in the year following he had advanced far
enough in learning to dispute in public, to teach Euclid in the Gymnasium,
and to take occasional classes in Dialectics and Elementary Philosophy. At
the end of his twenty-second year the country was convulsed by the wars
between the Spaniards and the French under Lautrec, which ended in the
expulsion of the last-named and the establishment of the Imperial power in
Milan. Another result of the war, more germane to this history, was the

closing of the University of Pavia through lack of funds. In consequence of
this calamity Jerome remained some time in Milan, and during these
months he worked hard at mathematics; but he was not destined to return to
Pavia as a student. The schools there remained some long time in confusion,
so in 1524 he went with his father's consent to Padua. In the autumn of that
same year he was summoned back to Milan to find Fazio in the grip of his
dying illness. "Whereupon he, careful of my weal rather than his own, bade
me return to Padua at once, being well pleased to hear that I had taken at the
Venetian College the Baccalaureat of Arts.[35] After my return to Padua,
letters were brought to me which told me that he had died on the ninth day
after he had refused nourishment. He died on the twenty-eighth of August,
having last eaten on Sunday the twentieth of the month. Towards the close
of my twenty-fourth year I was chosen Rector of the Academy at Padua,[36]
and at the end of the next was made Doctor of Medicine. For the first-
named office I came out the victor by one vote, the suffrages having to be
cast a second time; and for the Doctorate of Medicine my name had already
twice come forth from the ballot with forty-seven votes cast against me (a
circumstance which forbade another voting after the third), when, at the
third trial, I came out the winner, with only nine votes against me
(previously only this same number had been cast for me), and with forty-
eight in my favour.
"Though I know well enough that affairs like these must needs be of small
account, I have set them down in the order in which they came to pass for
no other reason than that I give pleasure to myself who write these words
by so doing: and I do not write for the gratification of others. At the same
time those people who read what I write—if indeed any one should ever be
so minded—may learn hereby that the beginnings and the outcomes of great
events may well be found difficult to trace, because in sooth it is the way of
such things to come to the notice of anybody rather than of those who
would rightly observe them."[37]
Padua cannot claim for its University an antiquity as high as that which may
be conceded to Pavia, but in spite of its more recent origin, there is no little
obscurity surrounding its rise. The one fact which may be put down as
certain is that it sprang originally from the University of Bologna. Early in
the thirteenth century violent discords arose between the citizens of

Bologna and the students, and there is a tradition that the general school of
teaching was transferred to Padua in 1222. What happened was probably a
large migration of students, part of whom remained behind when peace
between town and gown in Bologna was restored. The orthodox origin of
the University is a charter granted by Frederic II. in 1238. Frederic at this
time was certainly trying to injure Bologna, actuated by a desire to help on
his own University at Naples, and to crush Bologna as a member of the
Lombard League.[38] Padua, however, was also a member of this league, so
his benevolent action towards it is difficult to understand. In 1228 the
students had quarrelled with the Paduan citizens, and there was a movement
to migrate to Vercelli; but, whether this really took place or not, the Paduan
school did not suffer: its ruin and extinction was deferred till the despotism
of the Ezzelini. In 1260 it was again revived by a second migration from
Bologna, and this movement was increased on account of the interdict laid
by the Pope upon Bologna in 1306 after the expulsion of the Papal Legate
by the citizens.
In the early days Medicine and Arts were entirely subordinate to the schools
of canon and civil law; but by the end of the fourteenth century these first-
named Faculties had obtained a certain degree of independence, and were
allowed an equal share in appointing the Rector.[39] The first College was
founded in 1363, and after 1500 the number rapidly increased. The
dominion of the Dukes of Carrara after 1322 was favourable to the growth
of the University, which, however, did not attain its highest point till it came
under Venetian rule in 1404. The Venetian government raised the stipends
of the professors, and allowed four Paduan citizens to act as Tutores Studii;
the election of the professors being vested in the students, which custom
obtained until the end of the sixteenth century.[40] The Rector was allowed
to wear a robe of purple and gold; and, when he retired, the degree of
Doctor was granted to him, together with the right to wear the golden collar
of the order of Saint Mark.
Padua like Athens humanized its conquerors. It became the University town
of Venice, as Pavia was of Milan, and it was for a long time protected from
the assaults of the Catholic reaction by its rulers, who possibly were
instigated rather by political jealousy of the Papacy as a temporal power,
than by any enthusiasm for the humanist and scientific studies of which

Padua was the most illustrious home south of the Alps; studies which the
powers of the Church began already to recognize as their most dangerous
foes.
Such was the University of Padua at the height of its glory, and it will be
apparent at once that Padua must have fallen considerably in its fortunes
when it installed as its Rector an obscure student, only twenty-four years of
age, and of illegitimate birth, and conferred upon him the right to go clad in
purple and gold, and to claim, as his retiring gift, the degree of Doctor and
the cross of Saint Mark. In 1508 the League of Cambrai had been formed,
and Venice, not yet recovered from the effects of its disastrous wars with
Bajazet II., was forced to meet the combined assault of the Pope, the
Emperor, and the King of France. Padua was besieged by the Imperial
forces, a motley horde of Germans, Swiss, and Spaniards, and the
surrounding country was pillaged and devastated by these savages with a
cruelty which recalled the days of Attila. It is not wonderful that the
University closed its doors in such a time. When the confederates began to
fight amongst themselves the class-rooms were reopened, intermittently at
first, but after 1515 the teaching seems to have been continuous. Still the
prevalent turmoil and poverty rendered it necessary to curtail all the mere
honorary and ornamental adjuncts of the schools, and for several years no
Rector was appointed, for the good and sufficient reason that no man of due
position and wealth and character could be found to undertake the rectorial
duties, with the Academy just emerging from complete disorganization.
These duties were many and important, albeit the Rector could, if he willed,
appoint a deputy, and the calls upon the purse of the holder must have been
very heavy. It would be hard to imagine any one less fitted to fill such a
post than Cardan, and assuredly no office could befit him less than this
pseudo-rectorship.[41] It must ever remain a mystery why he was preferred,
why he was elected, and why he consented to serve: though, as to the last-
named matter, he hints in a passage lately cited from De Utilitate, that it
was through the persuasions of his mother that he took upon himself this
disastrous honour. Many pasages in his writings suggest that Chiara was an
indulgent parent. She let Fazio have no peace till he consented to allow the
boy to go to college; she paid secretly for music-lessons, so that Jerome was
enabled to enjoy the relaxation he loved better than anything else in the
world—except gambling; she paid all his charges during his student life at

Padua; and now, quite naturally, she would have shed her heart's blood
rather than let this son of hers—ugly duckling as he was—miss what she
deemed to be the crowning honour of the rectorship; but after all the
sacrifices Chiara made, after all the misfortunes which attended Jerome's
ill-directed ambition, there is a doubt as to whether he ever was Rector in
the full sense of the term. Many times and in divers works he affirms that
once upon a time he was Rector, and over and beyond this he sets down in
black and white the fact, more than once, that he never told a lie; so it is
only polite to accept this legend for what it is worth. But it must likewise be
noted that in the extant records of the University there is no mention of his
name in the lists of Rectors.[42]
Jerome has left very few details as to his life at Padua. Of those which he
notices the following are the most interesting: "In 1525, the year in which I
became Rector, I narrowly escaped drowning in the Lago di Garda. I went
on board the boat, unwillingly enough, which carried likewise some hired
horses; and, as we sailed on, the mast and the rudder, and one of the two
oars we had with us, were broken by the wind. The sails, even those on the
smaller mast, were split, and the night came on. We landed at last safe and
sound at Sirmio, but not before all my companions had given up hope, and I
myself was beginning to despair. Indeed, had we been a minute later we
must have perished, for the tempest was so violent that the iron hinges of
the inn windows were bent thereby. I, though I had been sore afraid ever
since the wind began to blow, fell to supper with a good heart when the host
set upon the board a mighty pike, but none of the others had any stomach
for food, except the one passenger who had advised us to make trial of this
perilous adventure, and who had proved to be an able and courageous
helper in our hour of distress.
"Again, once when I was in Venice on the birthday of the Virgin, I lost
some money at dicing, and on the day following all that was left me went
the same way. This happened in the house of the man with whom I was
gambling, and in the course of play I noticed that the cards were marked,
whereupon I struck him in the face with my dagger, wounding him slightly.
Two of his servants were present at the time; some spears hung all ready
from the beams of the roof, and besides this the house door was fastened.
But when I had taken from him all the money he had about him—his own
as well as that which he had won from me by cheating, and my cloak and

the rings which I had lost to him the day before—I was satisfied that I had
got back all my possessions. The chattels I sent home by my servant at
once, but a portion of the money I tossed back to the fellow when I saw that
I had drawn blood of him. Then I attacked the servants who were standing
by; and, as they knew not how to use their weapons and besought my
mercy, I granted this on the condition that they should unlock the door.
Their master, taking account of the uproar and confusion, and mistrusting
his safety in case the affair should not be settled forthwith (I suspect he was
alarmed about the marked cards), commanded the servants to open the door,
whereupon I went my way.
"That very same evening, while I was doing my best to escape the notice of
the officers of justice on account of the wound I had given to this Senator, I
lost my footing and fell into a canal, having arms under my cloak the while.
In my fall I did not lose my nerve, but flinging out my right arm, I grasped
the thwart of a passing boat and was rescued by those on board. When I had
been hauled into the boat I discovered—wonderful to relate—that the man
with whom I had lately played cards was likewise on board, with his face
bandaged by reason of the wounds I had given him. Now of his own accord
he brought out a suit of clothes, fitted for seafaring, and, having clad myself
in them, I journeyed with him as far as Padua."[43]
Cardan's life from rise to set cannot be estimated otherwise than an unhappy
one, and its least fortunate years were probably those lying between his
twenty-first and his thirty-first year of age. During this period he was guilty
of that crowning folly, the acceptance of the Rectorship of the Gymnasium
at Padua, he felt the sharpest stings of poverty, and his life was
overshadowed by dire physical misfortune. He gives a rapid sketch of the
year following his father's death. "Then, my father having breathed his last
and my term of office come to an end, I went, at the beginning of my
twenty-sixth year, to reside at Sacco, a town distant ten miles from Padua
and twenty-five from Venice. I fixed on this place by the advice of
Francesco Buonafidei, a physician of Padua, who, albeit I brought no profit
to him—not even being one of those who attended his public teaching—
helped me and took a liking for me, being moved to this benevolence by his
exceeding goodness of heart. In this place I lived while our State was being
vexed by every sort of calamity. In 1524 by a raging pestilence and by a
two-fold change of ruler. In 1526 and 1527 by a destructive scarcity of the

fruits of the earth. It was hard to get corn in exchange for money of any
kind, and over and beyond this was the intolerable weight of taxation. In
1528 the land was visited by divers diseases and by the plague as well, but
these afflictions seemed the easier to bear because all other parts were
likewise suffering from the same. In 1529 I ventured to return to Milan—
these ill-starred troubles being in some degree abated—but I was refused
membership by the College of Physicians there, I was unable to settle my
lawsuit with the Barbiani, and I found my mother in a very ill humour, so I
went back to my village home, having suffered greatly in health during my
absence. For what with cruel vexations, and struggles, and cares which I
saw impending, and a troublesome cough and pleurisy aggravated by a
copious discharge of humour, I was brought into a condition such as few
men exchange for aught else besides a coffin."[44]
The closing words of his eulogy on his father tell how the son, on the
father's death, found that one small house was all he could call his own. The
explanation of this seems to be that the old man, being of a careless
disposition and litigious to boot, had left his affairs in piteous disorder. In
consequence of this neglect Jerome was involved in lawsuits for many
years, and the one afore-mentioned with the Barbiani was one of them. This
case was subsequently settled in Jerome's favour.

FOOTNOTES:
[28] Pavia, like certain modern universities, did not spend all its time over study.
"Aggressus sum Mediolani vacationibus quadragenariæ, seu Bacchanalium
potius, anni MDLXI. Ita enim non obscurum est, nostra ætate celebrari ante
quadragenariam vacationes, in quibus ludunt, convivantur, personati ac larvati
incedunt, denique nullum luxus ac lascivæ genus omittunt: Sybaritæ et Lydi
Persæque vincuntur." Opera, tom. i. p. 118.
[29] These books were taken to Blois. They were subsequently removed by
Francis I. to Fontainebleau, and with the other collections formed the nucleus of
the Bibliothèque Nationale.
[30] De Vita Propria, ch. v. p. 18.
[31] The time covered by this experience was from his fourth to his seventh year.
[32] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxvii. p. 114; De Rerum Subtilitate (Basil, 1554), p.
524.
[33] Opera, tom. i. p. 61.

[34] "Erat liber exiguus, rem tamen probe absolvebat: nam tunc forte in manus
meas inciderat, Gebri Hispani liber, cujus auxilio non parum adjutus sum."—
Opera, tom. i. p. 56.
[35] "Initio multi quidem paupertate aliave causa quum se nolunt subjicere
rigoroso examini Cl. Collegii in artibus Medicinae vel in Jure, Baccalaureatus,
vel Doctoratus gradum a Comitibus Palatinis aut Lateranensibus sumebant.
Postea vero, sublata hac consuetudine, Gymnasii Rector, sive substitutus,
convocatis duobus professoribus, bina puncta dabantur, iisque recitatis et
diligentis [sic] excussis, illis gradus Baccalaureatus conferebatur."—Gymnasium
Patavinum (1654), p. 200.
[36] He constantly bewails this step as the chief folly of his life: "Stulte vero id
egi, quod Rector Gymnasii Patavini effectus sum, tum, cum, inops essem, et in
patria maxime bella vigerent, et tributa intolerabilia. Matris tamen solicitudine
effectum est, ut pondus impensarum, quamvis aegre, sustinuerim."—De
Utilitate, p. 350.
[37] De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. 11.
[38] Muratori, Chron. di Bologna, xviii. 254.
[39] The stipends paid to teachers of jurisprudence were much more liberal than
those paid to humanists. In the Diary of Sanudo it is recorded that a jurist
professor at Padua received a thousand ducats per annum. Lauro Quirino, a
professor of rhetoric, meantime received only forty ducats, and Laurentius Valla
at Pavia received fifty sequins.—Muratori, xxii. 990.
[40] Tomasinus, Gymnasium Patavinam (1654), p. 136.
[41] Tomasinus writes that the Rector should be "Virum illustrem, providum,
eloquentem ac divitem, quique eo pollet rerum usu ut Gymnasi decora ipsius
gubernatione et splendore augeantur."—Gymnasium Patavinum, p. 54. He
likewise gives a portrait of the Rector in his robes of office, and devotes several
chapters to an account of his duties.
[42] "Ab anno 1509 usque ad annum 1515 ob bellum Cameracense Gymn.
interrmissum fuit."—Elenchus nominum Patavii (1706), p. 28. The first names
given after this interregnum are Dom. Jo. Maria de Zaffaris, Rector in Arts, and
Dom. Marinus de Ongaris, Rector in Jurisprudence in 1527.
Papadapoli (Historia Gymn. Patav.) gives the name of Ascanius Serra as pro-
Rector in 1526: no Rector being mentioned at all.
[43] De Vita Propria, ch. xxx. p. 79.
[44] De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. 13.

CHAPTER III
During his life at Padua it would appear that Cardan, over and above the
allowance made to him by his mother, had no other source of income than
the gaming-table.[45] However futile and disastrous his sojourn at this
University may have been, he at least took away with him one possession of
value, to wit his doctorate of medicine, on the strength of which he began to
practise as a country physician at Sacco. The record of his life during these
years gives the impression that he must have been one of the most wretched
of living mortals. The country was vexed by every sort of misfortune, by
prolonged warfare, by raging pestilence, by famine, and by intolerable
taxation;[46] but while he paints this picture of misery and desolation in one
place, he goes on to declare in another that the time which he spent at Sacco
was the happiest he ever knew.[47] No greater instance of inconsistency is to
be found in his pages. He writes: "I gambled, I occupied myself with music,
I walked abroad, I feasted, giving scant attention the while to my studies. I
feared no hurt, I paid my respects to the Venetian gentlemen living in the
town, and frequented their houses. I, too, was in the very flower of my age,
and no time could have been more delightful than this which lasted for five
years and a half."[48]
But for almost the whole of this period Cardan was labouring under a
physical misfortune concerning which he writes in another place in terms of
almost savage bitterness. During ten years of his life, from his twenty-first
to his thirty-first year, he suffered from the loss of virile power, a calamity
which he laments in the following words: "And I maintain that this
misfortune was to me the worst of evils. Compared with it neither the harsh
servitude under my father, nor unkindness, nor the troubles of litigation, nor
the wrongs done me by my fellow-townsmen, nor the scorn of my fellow-
physicians, nor the ill things falsely spoken against me, nor all the
measureless mass of possible evil, could have brought me to such despair,
and hatred of life, and distaste of all pleasure, and lasting sorrow. I bitterly
wept this misery, that I must needs be a laughing-stock, that marriage must
be denied me, and that I must ever live in solitude. You ask for the cause of

this misfortune, a matter which I am quite unable to explain. Because of the
reasons just mentioned, and because I dreaded that men should know how
grave was the ill afflicting me, I shunned the society of women; and, on
account of this habit, the same miserable public scandal which I desired so
earnestly to avoid, arose concerning me, and brought upon me the suspicion
of still more nefarious practices: in sooth it seemed that there was no further
calamity left for me to endure."[49] After reading these words, it is hard to
believe that a man, afflicted with a misfortune which he characterizes in
these terms, could have been even moderately happy; much less in that state
of bliss which he sits down to describe forty years afterwards.
But the end of his life at Sacco was fated to be happier than the beginning,
and it is possible that memories of the last months he spent there may have
helped to colour with rosy tint the picture of happiness recently referred to.
In the first place he was suddenly freed from his physical infirmity, and
shortly after his restoration he met and married the woman who, as long as
she lived with him, did all that was possible to make him happy. Every
momentous event of Cardan's life—and many a trifling one as well—was
heralded by some manifestation of the powers lying beyond man's
cognition. In writing about the signs and tokens which served as
premonitions of his courtship and marriage, he glides easily into a
description of the events themselves in terms which are worth producing.
"In times past I had my home in Sacco, and there I led a joyful life, as if I
were a man unvexed by misfortune (I recall this circumstance somewhat out
of season, but the dream I am about to tell of seems only too appropriate to
the occasion), or a mortal made free of the habitations of the blest, or rather
of some region of delight. Then, on a certain night, I seemed to find myself
in a pleasant garden, beautiful exceedingly, decked with flowers and filled
with fruits of divers sorts, and a soft air breathed around. So lovely was it
all that no painter nor our poet Pulci, nor any imagination of man could
have figured the like. I was standing in the forecourt of this garden, the door
whereof was open, and there was another door on the opposite side, when
lo! I beheld before me a damsel clad in white. I embraced and kissed her;
but before I could kiss her again, the gardener closed the door. I straightway
begged him earnestly that he would open it again, but I begged in vain;
wherefore, plunged in grief and clinging to the damsel, I seemed to be shut
out of the garden.

"A little time after this there was a rumour in the town of a house on fire,
and I was roused from sleep to hurry to the spot. Then I learned that the
house belonged to one Altobello Bandarini,[50] a captain of the Venetian
levies in the district of Padua. I had no acquaintance with him, in sooth I
scarcely knew him by sight. Now it chanced that after the fire he hired a
house next door to my own, a step which displeased me somewhat, for such
a neighbour was not to my taste; but what was I to do? After the lapse of a
few days, when I was in the street, I perceived a young girl who, as to her
face and her raiment, was the exact image of her whom I had beheld in my
dream. But I said to myself, 'What is this girl to me? If I, poor wretch that I
am, take to wife a girl dowered with naught, except a crowd of brothers and
sisters, it will be all over with me; forasmuch as I can hardly keep myself as
it is. If I should attempt to carry her off, or to have my will of her by stealth,
there will of a surety be some tale-bearers about; and her father, being a
fellow-townsman and a soldier to boot, would not sit down lightly under
such an injury. In this case, or in that, it is hard to say what course I should
follow, for if this affair should come to the issue I most desire, I must needs
fly the place.' From that same hour these thoughts and others akin to them
possessed my brain, which was only too ready to harbour them, and I felt it
would be better to die than to live on in such perplexity. Thenceforth I was
as one love-possessed, or even burnt up with passion, and I understood
what meaning I might gather from the reading of my dream. Moreover I
was by this time freed from the chain which had held me back from
marriage. Thus I, a willing bridegroom, took a willing bride, her kinsfolk
questioning us how this thing had been brought about, and offering us any
help which might be of service; which help indeed proved of very
substantial benefit.
"But the interpretation of my dreams did not work itself out entirely in the
after life of my wife; it made itself felt likewise in the lives of my children.
My wife lived with me fifteen years, and alas! this ill-advised marriage was
the cause of all the misfortunes which subsequently happened to me. These
must have come about either by the working of the divine will, or as the
recompense due for some ill deeds wrought by myself or by my
forefathers."[51]
The dream aforesaid was not the only portent having reference to his
marriage. After describing shakings and tremblings of his bed, for which

indeed a natural cause was not far to seek, he tells how in 1531 a certain
dog, of gentle temper as a rule, and quiet, kept up a persistent howling for a
long time; how some ravens perched on the house-top and began croaking
in an unusual manner; and how, when his servant was breaking up a faggot,
some sparks of fire flew out of the same; whereupon, "by an unlooked-for
step I married a wife, and from that time divers misfortunes have attended
me."[52] Lucia, the wife of his choice, was the eldest daughter of Altobello
Bandarini, who had, besides her, three daughters and four sons. Jerome, as
it has been already noted, was possessed with a fear lest he should be
burdened by his brothers- and sisters-in-law after his marriage; but,
considering that he was a young unknown physician, without either money
or patients, and that Bandarini was a man of position and repute, with some
wealth and more shrewdness, the chances were that the burden would lie on
the other side. Cardan seems to have inherited Fazio's contempt for wealth,
or at least to have made a profession thereof; for, in chronicling the event of
his marriage, he sets down, with a certain degree of pomposity, that he took
a wife without a dower on account of a certain vow he had sworn.[53] If the
bride was penniless the father-in-law was wealthy, and the last-named fact
might well have proved a powerful argument to induce Cardan to remain at
Sacco, albeit he had little scope for his calling. That he soon determined to
quit the place, is an evidence of his independence of spirit, and of his
disinclination to sponge upon his well-to-do connections. Bandarini, when
this scheme was proposed to him, vetoed it at once. He was unwilling to
part with his daughter, and possibly he may have taken a fancy to his son-
in-law, for Cardan has left it on record that Bandarini was greatly pleased
with the match; he ended, however, by consenting to the migration, which
was not made without the intervention of a warning portent. A short time
before the young couple departed, it happened that a tile got mixed with the
embers in Bandarini's bed-chamber; and, in the course of the night,
exploded with a loud report, and the fragments thereof were scattered
around. This event Bandarini regarded as an augury of evil, and indeed evil
followed swiftly after. Before a year had passed he was dead, some holding
that his death had been hastened by the ill conduct of his eldest son, and
others whispering suspicions of poison.
Jerome and his young wife betook themselves to Milan, but this visit seems
to have been fully as unprofitable as the one he had paid in 1529. In that

year he had to face his first rejection by the College of Physicians, when he
made application for admission; and there is indirect evidence that he now
made a second application with no better result.[54] In any case his affairs
were in a very bad way. If he had money in his pocket he would not keep
long away from the gaming-table; and, with the weight of trouble ever
bearing him down more and more heavily, it is almost certain that his spirits
must have suffered, and that poor Lucia must have passed many an unhappy
hour on account of his nervous irritability. Then the gates of his profession
remained closed to him by the action of the College. The pretext the
authorities gave for their refusal to admit him was his illegitimate birth; but
it is not unlikely that they may have mistrusted as a colleague the son of
Fazio Cardano, and that stories of the profligate life and the intractable
temper of the candidate may have been brought to them.[55] His health
suffered from the bad air of the city almost as severely as before, and Lucia,
who was at this time pregnant, miscarried at four months, and shortly
afterwards had a second misfortune of the same kind. His mother's temper
was not of the sweetest, and it is quite possible that between her and her
daughter-in-law there may have been strained relations. Cardan at any rate
found that he must once more beat a retreat from Milan, wherefore, at the
end of April 1533, he made up his mind to remove to Gallarate.
This town has already been mentioned as chief place of the district, from
which the Cardan family took its origin. Before going thither Jerome had
evidently weighed the matter well, and he has set down at some length the
reasons which led him to make this choice. "Thus, acting under the reasons
aforesaid (the family associations), I resolved to go to Gallarate, in order
that I might have the enjoyment of four separate advantages which it
offered. Firstly, that in the most healthy air of the place I might shake off
entirely the distemper which I had contracted in Milan. Secondly, that I
might earn something by my profession, seeing that then I should be free to
practise. Thirdly, that there would be no need for me to pine away while I
beheld those physicians, by whom I reckoned I had been despoiled,
flourishing in wealth and in the high estimation of all men. Lastly, that by
following a more frugal way of life, I might make what I possessed last the
longer. For all things are cheaper in the country, since they have to be
carried from the country into the town, and many necessaries may be had
for the asking. Persuaded by these arguments, I went to this place, and I was

not altogether deceived, seeing that I recovered my health, and the son—
who was to be reft from me later on by the Senate—was born to me."[56]
Employment at Gallarate was, however, almost as scarce as it had been at
Sacco, wherefore Jerome found leisure in plenty for literary work. He began
a treatise on Fate; but, even had this been completed, it would scarcely have
filled the empty larder by the proceeds of its sale. More profitable was some
chance employment which was given to him by Filippo Archinto,[57] a
generous and accomplished young nobleman of Milan, who was ambitious
to figure as a writer on Astronomy, and, it may be remarked, Archinto's
benefactions were not confined to the payment for the hack work which
Jerome did for him at this period. Had it not been for his subsequent
patronage and support, it is quite possible that Cardan would have gone
under in the sea of adversity.
In spite of the cheapness of provisions at Gallarate, and of occasional meals
taken gratis from the fields, complete destitution seemed to be only a matter
of days, and just at this crisis, to add to his embarrassments—though he
longed earnestly for the event—Lucia was brought to bed with her first-
born living child on May 14, 1534. The child's birth was accompanied by
divers omens, one of which the father describes, finding therein some
premonition of future disaster. "I had great fear of his life until the fifteenth
day of June, on which day, being a Sunday, he was baptized. The sun shone
brightly into the bed-chamber: it was between the hours of eleven and
twelve in the forenoon; and, according to custom, we were all gathered
round the mother's bed except a young servant, the curtain was drawn away
from the window and fastened to the wall, when suddenly a large wasp flew
into the room, and circled round the infant. We were all greatly afeard for
the child, but the wasp did him no hurt. The next moment it came against
the curtain, making so great a noise that you would have said that a drum
was being beaten, and all ran towards the place, but found no trace of the
wasp. It could not have flown out of the room, because all eyes had been
fixed upon it. Then all of us who were then present felt some foreboding of
what subsequently came to pass, but did not deem that the end would be so
bitter as it proved to be."[58]
The impulse which drives men in desperate straits to seek shelter in the
streets of a city was as strong in Cardan's time as it is to-day. At Gallarate

the last coin was now spent, and there was an extra mouth to feed. There
seemed to be no other course open but another retreat to Milan. Archinto
was rich in literary ambitions, which might perchance stimulate him to find
farther work for the starving scholar: and there was Chiara also who would
scarcely let her grandchild die of want. The revelation which Cardan makes
of himself and of his way of life at this time is not one to enlist sympathy
for him entirely; but it is not wanting in a note of pathetic sincerity. "For a
long time the College at Milan refused to admit me, and during these days I
was assuredly a spendthrift and heedless. In body I was weakly, and in
estate plundered by thieves on all sides, yet I never grudged money for the
buying of books. My residence at Gallarate brought me no profit, for in the
whole nineteen months I lived there, I did not receive more than twenty-five
crowns towards the rent of the house I hired. I had such ill luck with the
dice that I was forced to pawn all my wife's jewels, and our very bed. If it is
a wonder that I found myself thus bereft of all my substance, it is still more
wonderful that I did not take to begging on account of my poverty, and a
wonder greater still that I harboured in my mind no unworthy thoughts
against my forefathers, or against right living, or against those honours
which I had won—honours which afterwards stood me in good stead—but
bore my misfortunes with mind undisturbed."[59]
Cardan's worldly fortunes were now at their lowest ebb. Burdened with a
wife and child, he had found it necessary to return, after a second futile
attempt to gain a living by his calling in a country town, to Milan, his
"stony-hearted step-mother." If he had reckoned on his mother's bounty he
was doomed to disappointment, for Chiara was an irritable woman, and as
her son's temper was none of the sweetest, it is almost certain that they must
have quarrelled occasionally. It is hard to believe that they could have been
on good terms at this juncture, otherwise she would scarcely have allowed
him to take his wife and child to what was then the public workhouse of the
city;[60] but this place was his only refuge, and in October 1534 he was glad
to shelter himself beneath its roof.
There was in Cardan's nature a strong vein of melancholy, and up to the
date now under consideration he had been the victim of a fortune calculated
to deepen rather than disperse his morbid tendencies. A proof of his high
courage and dauntless perseverance may be deduced from the fact that
neither poverty, nor the sense of repeated failure, nor the flouts of the

Milanese doctors, prevailed at any time to quench in his heart the love of
fame,[61] or to disabuse him of the conviction that he, poverty-stricken
wretch as he was, would before long bind Fortune to his chariot-wheels,
and would force the adverse world to acknowledge him as one of its master
minds. The dawn was now not far distant, but the last hours of his night of
misfortune were very dark. The worst of the struggle, as far as the world
was concerned, was over, and the sharpest sorrows and the heaviest
disgrace reserved for Cardan in the future were to be those nourished in his
own household.
Writing of his way of life and of the vices and defects of his character, he
says: "If a man shall fail in his carriage before the world as he fails in other
things, who shall correct him? Thus I myself will do duty for that one leper
who alone out of the ten who were healed came back to our Lord. By
reasoning of this sort, Physicians and Astrologers trace back the origin of
our natural habits to our primal qualities, to the training of our will, and to
our occupations and conversation. In every man all these are found in
proper ratio to the time of life of each individual; nevertheless it will be
easy to discern marked variations in cases otherwise similar. Therefore it
behoves us to hold fast to some guiding principle chosen out of these, and I
on my part am inclined, as far as it may be allowed, to say with respect to
all of them, γνω̑θι σεαυὸν.
"My own nature in sooth was never a mystery to myself. I was ever hot-
tempered, single-minded, and given to women. From these cardinal
tendencies there proceeded truculence of temper, wrangling, obstinacy,
rudeness of carriage, anger, and an inordinate desire, or rather a headstrong
passion, for revenge in respect to any wrong done to me; so that this
inclination, which is censured by many, became to me a delight. To put it
briefly, I held At vindicta bonum vita jucundius ipsa. As a general rule I
went astray but seldom, though it is a common saying, 'Natura nostra prona
est ad malum.' I am moreover truthful, mindful of benefits wrought to me, a
lover of justice and of my own people, a despiser of money, a worshipper of
that fame which defies death, prone to thrust aside what is commonplace,
and still more disposed to treat mere trifles in the same way. Still, knowing
well how great may be the power of little things at any moment during the
course of an undertaking, I never make light of aught which may be useful.
By nature I am prone to every vice and ill-doing except ambition, and I, if

no one else does, know my own imperfections. But because of my
veneration for God, and because I recognize the vanity and emptiness of all
things of this sort, it often happens that, of my own free will, I forego
certain opportunities for taking revenge which may be offered to me. I am
timid, with a cold heart and a hot brain, given to reflection and the
consideration of things many and mighty, and even of things which can
never come to pass. I can even let my thoughts concern themselves with
two distinct subjects at the same time. Those who throw out charges of
garrulity and extravagance by way of contradicting any praise accorded to
me, charge me with the faults of others rather than my own. I attack no
man, I only defend myself.
"And what reason is there why I should spend myself in this cause since I
have so often borne witness of the emptiness of this life of ours? My excuse
must be that certain men have praised me, wherefore they cannot deem me
altogether wicked. I have always trained myself to let my face contradict
my thoughts. Thus while I can simulate what is not, I cannot dissimulate
what is. To accomplish this is no difficult task if a man cultivates likewise
the habit of hoping for nothing. By striving for fifteen years to compass this
end and by spending much trouble over the same I at last succeeded. Urged
on by this humour I sometimes go forth in rags, sometimes finely dressed,
sometimes silent, sometimes talkative, sometimes joyful, sometimes sad;
and on this account my two-fold mood shows everything double. In my
youth I rarely spent any care in keeping my hair in order, because of my
inclination for other pursuits more to my taste. My gait is irregular. I move
now quickly, now slowly. When I am at home I go with my legs naked as
far as the ankles. I am slack in duty and reckless in speech, and specially
prone to show irritation over anything which may disgust or irk me."
The above-written self-description does not display a personality
particularly attractive. Jerome Cardan was one of those men who
experience a morbid gratification in cataloguing all their sinister points of
character, and exaggerating them at the same time; and in this picture, as in
many others scattered about the De Vita Propria, the shadows may have
been put in too strongly.
In the foregoing pages reference was made to certain acts of benevolence
done to Cardan by the family of Archinto. It is not impossible that the

promises and persuasions of his young patron Filippo may have had some
weight in inducing Jerome to shift his home once more. Whatever befell he
could hardly make his case worse; but whether Filippo had promised help
or not, he showed himself now a true and valuable friend. There was in
Milan a public lectureship in geometry and astronomy supported by a small
endowment left by a certain Tommaso Plat, and to this post, which
happened opportunely to be vacant, Cardan was appointed by the good
offices of Filippo Archinto. Yet even when he was literally a pauper he
seems to have felt some scruples about accepting this office, but fortunately
in this instance his poverty overcame his pride. The salary was indeed a
very small one,[62] and the lecturer was not suffered to handle the whole of
it, but it was at least liberal enough to banish the dread of starvation, and his
duties, which consisted solely in the preparation and delivery of his
lectures, did not debar him from literary work on his own account.
Wherefore in his leisure time he worked hard at his desk.
Any differences which may have existed between him and his mother were
now removed, for he took her to live with him, the household being made
up of himself, his wife, his mother, a friend (a woman), a nurse, the little
boy, a man- and maidservant, and a mule.[63] Possibly Chiara brought her
own income with her, and thus allowed the establishment to be conducted
on a more liberal scale. The Plat lectureship would scarcely have
maintained three servants, and Jerome's gains from other sources must have
been as yet very slender. His life at this time was a busy one, but he always
contrived to portion out his days in such wise that certain hours were left
for recreation. At such times as he was called upon to teach, the class-room,
of course, had the first claims. After the lecture he would walk in the shade
outside the city walls, then return to his dinner, then divert himself with
music, and afterwards go fishing in the pools and streams hard by the town.
In the course of time he obtained other employment, being appointed
physician to the Augustinian friars. The Prior of this Order, Francesco
Gaddi, was indeed his first patient of note. He tells how he cured this man
of a biennial leprosy after treating him for six months;[64] adding that his
labour was in vain, inasmuch as Gaddi died a violent death afterwards. The
refusal of the College of Milan to admit him to membership did not forbid
him to prescribe for whatever patients might like to consult him by virtue of
his Paduan degree. He read voraciously everything which came in his way,

and it must have been during these years that he stored his memory with
that vast collection of facts out of which he subsequently compounded the
row of tomes which form his legacy to posterity. Filippo Archinto was
unfailing in his kindness, and Jerome at this time was fortunate enough to
attract the attention of certain other Milanese citizens of repute who
afterwards proved to be valuable friends; Ludovico Madio, Girolamo
Guerrini a jeweller, Francesco Belloti, and Francesco della Croce. The last-
named was a skilled jurisconsult, whose help proved of great service in a
subsequent litigation between Jerome and the College of Physicians.
All his life long Cardan was a dreamer of dreams, and he gives an account
of one of his visions in this year, 1534, which, whether regarded as an
allegory or as a portent, is somewhat remarkable. "In the year 1534, when I
was as it were groping in the dark, when I had settled naught as to my
future life, and when my case seemed to grow more desperate day by day, I
beheld in a dream the figure of myself running towards the base of a
mountain which stood upon my right hand, in company with a vast crowd
of people of every station and age and sex—women, men, old men, boys,
infants, poor men and rich men, clad in raiment of every sort. I inquired
whither we were all running, whereupon one of the multitude answered that
we were all hastening on to death. I was greatly terrified at these words,
when I perceived a mountain on my left hand. Then, having turned myself
round so that it stood on my right side, I grasped the vines (which, here in
the midst of the mountains and as far as the place wherein I stood, were
covered with dry leaves, and bare of grapes, as we commonly see them in
autumn) and began to ascend. At first I found this difficult, for the reason
that the mountain was very steep round the base, but having surmounted
this I made my way upward easily. When I had come to the summit it
seemed that I was like to pass beyond the dictates of my own will. Steep
naked rocks appeared on every side, and I narrowly escaped falling down
from a great height into a gloomy chasm. So dreadful is all this that now,
what though forty years have rolled away, the memory thereof still saddens
and terrifies me. Then, having turned towards the right where I could see
naught but a plain covered with heath, I took that path out of fear, and, as I
wended thither in reckless mood, I found that I had come to the entrance of
a rude hut, thatched with straw and reeds and rushes, and that I held by my

right hand a boy about twelve years of age and clad in a grey garment. Then
at this very moment I was aroused from sleep, and my dream vanished.
"In this vision was clearly displayed the deathless name which was to be
mine, my life of heavy and ceaseless work, my imprisonment, my seasons
of grievous terror and sadness, and my abiding-place foreshadowed as
inhospitable, by the sharp stones I beheld: barren, by the want of trees and
of all serviceable plants; but destined to be, nevertheless, in the end happy,
and righteous, and easy. This dream told also of my lasting fame in the
future, seeing that the vine yields a harvest every year. As to the boy, if he
were indeed my good spirit, the omen was lucky, for I held him very close.
If he were meant to foreshadow my grandson it would be less fortunate.
That cottage in the desert was my hope of rest. That overwhelming horror
and the sense of falling headlong may have had reference to the ruin of my
son.[65]
"My second dream occurred a short time after. It seemed to me that my soul
was in the heaven of the moon, freed from the body and all alone, and when
I was bewailing my fate I heard the voice of my father, saying: 'God has
appointed me as a guardian to you. All this region is full of spirits, but these
you cannot see, and you must not speak either to me or to them. In this part
of heaven you will remain for seven thousand years, and for the same time
in certain other stars, until you come to the eighth. After this you shall enter
the kingdom of God.' I read this dream as follows. My father's soul is my
tutelary spirit. What could be dearer or more delightful? The Moon signifies
Grammar; Mercury Geometry and Arithmetic; Venus Music, the Art of
Divination, and Poetry; the Sun the Moral, and Jupiter the Natural, World;
Mars Medicine; Saturn Agriculture, the knowledge of plants, and other
minor arts. The eighth star stands for a gleaning of all mundane things,
natural science, and various other studies. After dealing with these I shall at
last find my rest with the Prince of Heaven."[66]

FOOTNOTES:
[45] "Nec ullum mihi erat relictum auxilium nisi latrunculorum Ludus."—
Opera, tom. i. p. 619.

[46] From the formation of the League of Cambrai in 1508 to the establishment
of the Imperial supremacy in Italy in 1530, the whole country was desolated by
the marching and counter-marching of the contending forces. Milan, lying
directly in the path of the French armies, suffered most of all.
[47] Compare De Vita Propria, chaps. iv. and xxxi. pp. 13 and 92.
[48] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxi. p. 92. In taking the other view he writes: "Vitam
ducebam in Saccensi oppido, ut mihi videbar, infelicissime."—Opera, tom. i. p.
97.
[49] De Utilitate, p. 235.
[50] He gives a long and interesting sketch of his father-in-law in De Utilitate, p.
370.
[51] De Vita Propria, ch. xxvi. p. 68; Opera, tom. i. p. 97.
[52] De Vita Propria, ch. xli. p. 149.
[53] De Utilitate, p. 350.
[54] De Utilitate, p. 357: "Nam in urbe nec collegium recipere volebat nec cum
aliquo ex illis artem exercere licebat et sine illis difficillimum erat." He writes
thus while describing this particular visit to Milan.
[55] Ill fortune seems to have pursued the whole family in their relations with
learned societies. "Nam et pater meus ut ab eo accepi, diu in ingressu Collegii
Jurisconsultorum laboravit, et ego, ut alias testatus sum, bis a medicorum
Patavino, toties filius meus natu major, a Ticinensi, uterque a Mediolanensi
rejecti sumus."—Opera, tom. i. p. 94.
[56] De Utilitate, p. 358.
[57] He became a priest, and died Archbishop of Milan in 1552. Cardan
dedicated to him his first published book, De Malo Medendi.
[58] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxvii. p. 119.
[59] De Vita Propria, ch. xxv. p. 67.
[60] The Xenodochium, which was originally a stranger's lodging-house. By this
time places of this sort had become little else than succursales of some religious
house. The Governors of the Milanese Xenodochium were the patrons of the Plat
endowment which Cardan afterwards enjoyed.
[61] "Hoc unum sat scio, ab ineunte ætate me inextinguibili nominis immortalis
cupiditate flagrasse."—Opera, tom. i. p. 61.
[62] "Minimo tamen honorario, et illud etiam minimum suasu cujusdam amici
egregii praefecti Xenodochii imminuerunt; ita cum hujus recordor in mentem
venit fabellæ illius Apuleii de annonæ Praefecto."—Opera, tom. i. p. 64.
[63] De Utilitate, p. 351.

[64] The following gives a hint as to the treatment followed: "Referant leprosos
balneo ejus aquae in qua cadaver ablutum sit, sanari."—De Varietate, p. 334.
[65] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxvii. p. 121. This dream is also told in De Libris
Propriis, Opera, tom. i. p. 64.
[66] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxvii. p. 121.

CHAPTER IV
Jerome Cardan is now standing on the brink of authorship. The very title of
his first book, De Malo Recentiorum Medicorum Medendi Usu, gives plain
indication of the humour which possessed him, when he formulated his
subject and put it in writing. With his temper vexed by the persistent neglect
and insult cast upon him by the Milanese doctors he would naturally sit
down con amore to compile a list of the errors perpetrated by the ignorance
and bungling of the men who affected to despise him, and if his object was
to sting the hides of these pundits and arouse them to hostility yet more
vehement, he succeeded marvellously well. He was enabled to launch his
book rather by the strength of private friendship than by the hope of any
commercial success. Whilst at Pavia he had become intimate with
Ottaviano Scoto, a fellow-student who came from Venice, and in after times
he found Ottaviano's purse very useful to his needs. Since their college days
Ottaviano's father had died and had left his son to carry on his calling of
printing. In 1536 Jerome bethought him of his friend, and sent him the MS.
of the treatise which was to let the world learn with what little wisdom it
was being doctored.[67]
Ottaviano seems to have expected no profit from this venture, which was
manifestly undertaken out of a genuine desire to help his friend, and he
generously bore all the costs. Cardan deemed that, whatever the result of
the issue of the book might be, it would surely be to his benefit; he
hazarded nothing, and the very publication of his work would give him at
least notoriety. It would moreover give him the intense pleasure of knowing
that he was repaying in some measure the debt of vengeance owing to his
professional foes. The outcome was exactly the opposite of what printer and
author had feared and hoped. The success of the book was rapid and great.
Ottaviano must soon have recouped all the cost of publication; and, while
he was counting his money, the doctors everywhere were reading Jerome's
brochure, and preparing a ruthless attack upon the daring censor, who, with
the impetuosity of youth, had laid himself open to attack by the careless
fashion in which he had compiled his work. He took fifteen days to write it,

and he confesses in his preface to the revised edition that he found therein
over three hundred mistakes of one sort or another. The attack was naturally
led by the Milanese doctors. They demanded to be told why this man, who
was not good enough to practise by their sanction, was good enough to lay
down the laws for the residue of the medical world. They heaped blunder
upon blunder, and held him up to ridicule with all the wealth of invective
characteristic of the learned controversy of the age. Cardan was deeply
humbled and annoyed. "For my opponents, seizing the opportunity, took
occasion to assail me through the reasoning of this book, and cried out:
'Who can doubt that this man is mad? and that he would teach a method and
a practice of medicine differing from our own, since he has so many hard
things to say of our procedure.' And, as Galen said, I must in truth have
appeared crazy in my efforts to contradict this multitude raging against me.
For, as it was absolutely certain that either I or they must be in the wrong,
how could I hope to win? Who would take my word against the word of this
band of doctors of approved standing, wealthy, for the most part full of
years, well instructed, richly clad and cultivated in their bearing, well
versed in speaking, supported by crowds of friends and kinsfolk, raised by
popular approval to high position, and, what was more powerful than all
else, skilled in every art of cunning and deceit?"
Cardan had indeed prepared a bitter pill for his foes, but the draught they
compelled him to swallow was hardly more palatable. The publication of
the book naturally increased the difficulties of his position, and in this
respect tended to make his final triumph all the more noteworthy.

It was in 1536 that Cardan made his first essay as an author.[68] The next
three years of his life at Milan were remarkable as years of preparation and
accumulation, rather than as years of achievement. He had struck his first
blow as a reformer, and, as is often the lot of reformers, his sword had
broken in his hand, and there now rested upon him the sense of failure as a
superadded torment. Yet now and again a gleam of consolation would
disperse the gloom, and advise him that the world was beginning to
recognize his existence, and in a way his merits. In this same year he
received an offer from Pavia of the Professorship of Medicine, but this he
refused because he did not see any prospect of being paid for his services.
His friend Filippo Archinto was loyal still, and zealous in working for his
success, and as he had been recently promoted to high office in the Imperial

service, his good word might be very valuable indeed. He summoned his
protégé to join him at Piacenza, whither he had gone to meet Paul III.,
hoping to advance Cardan's interests with the Pope; but though Marshal
Brissac, the French king's representative,[69] joined Archinto in advocating
his cause, nothing was done, and Jerome returned disappointed to Milan.
In these months Cardan, disgusted by the failure of his late attack upon the
fortress of medical authority, turned his back, for a time, upon the study of
medicine, and gave his attention almost entirely to mathematics, in which
his reputation was high enough to attract pupils, and he always had one or
more of them in his house, the most noteworthy of whom was Ludovico
Ferrari of Bologna, who became afterwards a mathematician of repute, and
a teacher both at Milan and Bologna. While he was working at the De Malo
Medendi, he began a treatise upon Arithmetic, which he dedicated to his
friend Prior Gaddi; but this work was not published till 1539. In 1536 he
first heard a report of a fresh and important discovery in algebra, made by
one Scipio Ferreo of Bologna; the prologue to one of the most dramatic
incidents in his career, an incident which it will be necessary to treat at
some length later on.
Cardan was well aware that his excursions into astrology worked to his
prejudice in public esteem, but in spite of this he could not refrain
therefrom. It was during the plentiful leisure of this period that he cast the
horoscope of Jesus Christ, a feat which subsequently brought upon him
grave misfortune; a few patients came to him, moved no doubt by the spirit
which still prompts people suffering from obscure diseases to consult
professors of healing who are either in revolt or unqualified in preference to
going to the orthodox physician. In connection with this irregular practice
of his he gives a curious story about a certain Count Borromeo. "In 1536,
while I was attending professionally in the house of the Borromei, it
chanced that just about dawn I had a dream in which I beheld a serpent of
enormous bulk, and I was seized with fear lest I should meet my death
therefrom. Shortly afterwards there came a messenger to summon me to see
the son of Count Carlo Borromeo. I went to the boy, who was about seven
years old, and found him suffering from a slight distemper, but on feeling
his pulse I perceived that it failed at every fourth beat. His mother, the
Countess Corona, asked me how he fared, and I answered that there was not
much fever about him; but that, because his pulse failed at every fourth

beat, I was in fear of something, but what it might be I knew not rightly (but
I had not then by me Galen's books on the indications of the pulse).
Therefore, as the patient's state changed not, I determined on the third day
to give him in small doses the drug called Diarob: cum Turbit: I had already
written my prescription, and the messenger was just starting with it to the
pharmacy, when I remembered my dream. 'How do I know,' said I to
myself, 'that this boy may not be about to die as prefigured by the portent
above written? and in that case these other physicians who hate me so
bitterly, will maintain he died through taking this drug.' I called to the
messenger, and said there was wanting in the prescription something which
I desired to add. Then I privately tore up what I had written, and wrote out
another made of pearls, of the horn of unicorn,[70] and certain gems. The
powder was given, and was followed by vomiting. The bystanders
perceived that the boy was indeed sick, whereupon they called in three of
the chief physicians, one of whom was in a way friendly to me. They saw
the description of the medicine, and demanded what I would do now. Now
although two of these men hated me, it was not God's will that I should be
farther attacked, and they not only praised the medicine, but ordered that it
should be repeated. This was the saving of me. When I went again in the
evening I understood the case completely. The following morning I was
summoned at daybreak, and found the boy battling with death, and his
father lying in tears. 'Behold him,' he cried, 'the boy whom you declared to
ail nothing' (as if indeed I could have said such a thing); 'at least you will
remain with him as long as he lives.' I promised that I would, and a little
later the boy tried to rise, crying out the while. They held him down, and
cast all the blame upon me. What more is there to say? If there had been
found any trace of that drug Diarob: cum Turbit: (which in sooth was not
safe) it would have been all over with me, since Borromeo all his life would
either have launched against me complaints grave enough to make all men
shun me, or another Canidia, more fatal than African serpents, would have
breathed poison upon me."[71]
In this same year, 1536, Lucia brought forth another child, a daughter, and it
was about this time that Cardan first attracted the attention of Alfonso
d'Avalos, the Governor of Milan, and an intimacy began which, albeit
fruitless at first, was destined to be of no slight service to Jerome at the
crisis of his fortunes.[72] In the following year, in 1537, he made a

beginning of two of his books, which were subsequently found worthy of
being finished, and which may still be read with a certain interest: the
treatises De Sapientia and De Consolatione. Of the last-named, he remarks
that it pleased no one, forasmuch as it appealed not to those who were
happy, and the wretched rejected it as entirely inadequate to give them
solace in their evil case. In this year he made another attempt to gain
admission to the College at Milan, and was again rejected; the issue of the
De Malo Medendi was too recent, and it needed other and more potent
influences than those exercised by mere merit, to appease the fury of his
rivals and to procure him due status. But it would appear that, in 1536 or
1537, he negotiated with the College to obtain a quasi-recognition on
conditions which he afterwards describes as disgraceful to himself, and that
this was granted to him.[73]
Whatever his qualifications may have been, Cardan had no scruples in
treating the few patients who came to him. The first case he notes is that of
Donato Lanza,[74] a druggist, who had suffered for many years with blood-
spitting, which ailment he treated successfully. Success of this sort was
naturally helpful, but far more important than Lanza's cure was the
introduction given by the grateful patient to the physician, commending him
to Francesco Sfondrato, a noble Milanese, a senator, and a member of the
Emperor's privy council. The eldest son of this gentleman had suffered
many months from convulsions, and Cardan worked a cure in his case
without difficulty. Shortly afterwards another child, only ten months old,
was attacked by the same complaint, and was treated by Luca della Croce,
the procurator of the College of Physicians, of which Sfondrato was a
patron. As the attack threatened to be a serious one, Della Croce
recommended that another physician, Ambrogio Cavenago, should be
called in, but the father, remembering Cardan's cure of Lanza, wished for
him as well. The description of the meeting of the doctors round the sick
child's bed, of their quotations from Hippocrates, of the uncertainty and
helplessness of the orthodox practitioners, and of the ready resource of the
free-lance—who happens also to be the teller of the story—is a richly
typical one.[75] "We, the physicians and the father of the child, met about
seven in the morning, and Della Croce made a few general observations on
death, for he knew that Sfondrato was a sensible man, and he himself was
both honoured and learned. Cavenago kept silence at this stage, because the

last word had been granted to him. Then I said, 'Do you not see that the
child is suffering from Opisthotonos?' whereupon the first physician stood
as one dazed, as if I were trying to trouble his wits by my hard words. But
Della Croce at once swept aside all uncertainty by saying, 'He means the
backward contraction of the muscles.' I confirmed his words, and added, 'I
will show you what I mean.' Whereupon I raised the boy's head, which the
doctors and all the rest believed was hanging down through weakness, and
by its own weight, and bade them put it into its former position. Then
Sfondrato turned to me, and said, 'As you have discovered what the disease
is, tell us likewise what is the remedy therefor.' Since no one else spoke, I
turned towards him and—careful lest I should do hurt to the credit I had
gained already,—I said, 'You know what Hippocrates lays down in a case
like this—febrem convulsioni'—and I recited the aphorism. Then I ordered a
fomentation, and an application of lint moistened with linseed-oil and oil of
lilies, and gave directions that the child should be gently handled until such
time as the neck should be restored; that the nurse should eat no meat, and
that the child should be nourished entirely by the milk of her breast, and not
too much of that; that it should be kept in its cradle in a warm place, and
rocked gently till it should fall asleep. After the other physicians had gone, I
remember that the father of the child said to me, 'I give you this child for
your own,' and that I answered, 'You are doing him an ill turn, in that you
are supplanting his rich father by a poor one.' He answered, 'I am sure that
you would care for him as if he were your own, fearing naught that you
might thereby give offence to these others' (meaning the physicians). I said,
'It would please me well to work with them in everything, and to win their
support.' I thus blended my words, so that he might understand I neither
despaired of the child's cure, nor was quite confident thereanent. The cure
came to a favourable end; for, after the fourteenth day of the fever—the
weather being very warm—the child got well in four days' time. Now as I
review the circumstances, I am of opinion that it was not because I
perceived what the disease really was, for I might have done so much by
reason of my special practice; nor because I healed the child, for that might
have been attributed to chance; but because the child got well in four days,
whereas his brother lay ill for six months, and was then left half dead, that
his father was so much amazed at my skill, and afterwards preferred me to
all others. That he thought well of me is certain, because Della Croce
himself, during the time of his procuratorship, was full of spite and jealousy

against me, and declared in the presence of Cavenago and of Sfondrato, that
he would not, under compulsion, say a word in favour of a man like me,
one whom the College regarded with disfavour. Whereupon Sfondrato saw
that the envy and jealousy of the other physicians was what kept me out of
the College, and not the circumstances of my birth. He told the whole story
to the Senate, and brought such influence to bear upon the Governor of the
Province and other men of worship, that at last the entrance to the College
was opened to me."
Up to the time of his admission to the College, Jerome had never felt that he
could depend entirely upon medicine for his livelihood. He now determined
to publish his Practica Arithmeticæ, the book which he had prepared pari
passu with the ill-starred De Malo Medendi. It seems to have been
thoroughly revised and corrected, and was finally published in 1539, in
Milan; Cardan only received ten crowns for his work, but the sudden fame
he achieved as a mathematician ought to have set him on firm ground. His
friends were still working to secure for him benefits yet more substantial.
Alfonso d'Avalos, Francesco della Croce, the jurisconsult whose name has
already been mentioned, and the senator Sfondrato, were doing their best to
bring the physicians of the city into a more reasonable temper, and they
finally succeeded in 1539; when, after having been denied admission for
twelve years, Jerome Cardan became a member of the College, and a sharer
in all the privileges appertaining thereto.
Though Cardan was now a fully qualified physician, he spent his time for
the next year or two rather with letters than with medicine. He worked hard
at Greek, and as the result of his studies published somewhat prematurely a
treatise, De Immortalitate Animorum, a collection of extracts from Greek
writers which Julius Cæsar Scaliger with justice calls a confused farrago of
other men's learning.[76] He published also about this period the treatise on
Judicial Astrology, and the Essay De Consolatione, the only one of his
books which has been found worthy of an English translation.[77] In 1541
he became Rector of the College of Physicians, but there is no record of any
increase in the number of his patients by reason of this superadded dignity.
A passage in the De Vita Propria, written with even more than his usual
brutal candour, gives a graphic view of his manner of life at this period. "It
was in the summer of the year 1543, a time when it was my custom to go
every day to the house of Antonio Vicomercato, a gentleman of the city, and

to play chess with him from morning till night. As we were wont to play for
one real, or even three or four, on each game, I, seeing that I was generally
the winner, would as a rule carry away with me a gold piece after each day's
play, sometimes more and sometimes less. In the case of Vicomercato it was
a pleasure and nothing else to spend money in this wise; but in my own
there was an element of conflict as well; and in this manner I lost my self-
respect so completely that, for two years and more, I took no thought of
practising my art, nor considered that I was wasting all my substance—save
what I made by play—that my good name and my studies as well would
suffer shipwreck. But on a certain day towards the end of August, a new
humour seized Vicomercato (either advisedly on account of the constant
loss he suffered, or perhaps because he thought his decision would be for
my benefit), a determination from which he was to be moved neither by
arguments, nor adjurations, nor abuse. He forced me to swear that I would
never again visit his house for the sake of gaming, and I, on my part, swore
by all the gods as he wished. That day's play was our last, and thenceforth I
gave myself up entirely to my studies."[78]
But these studies unfortunately were not of a nature to keep the wolf from
the door; and Jerome, albeit now a duly qualified physician, and known to
fame as a writer on Mathematics far beyond the bounds of Italy, was well-
nigh as poor as ever. His mother had died several years before, in 1537; but
what little money she may have left would soon have been wasted in
gratifying his extravagant taste for costly things,[79] and at the gaming-table.
He found funds, however, for a journey to Florence, whither he went to see
d'Avalos, who was a generous, open-handed man, and always ready to put
his purse at the service of one whom he regarded as an honour to his city
and country. There can be little doubt that he helped Cardan liberally at this
juncture. The need for a loan was assuredly urgent enough. The recent
resumption of hostilities between the French and the Imperialists had led to
intolerable taxation throughout the Milanese provinces, and in consequence
of dearth of funds in 1543, the Academy at Pavia was forced to close its
class-rooms, and leave its teachers unpaid. The greater part of the
professors migrated to Pisa; and the Faculty of Medicine, then vacant, was,
pro formâ, transferred to Milan. This chair was now offered to Cardan. He
was in desperate straits—a third child had been born this year—and, though
there must have been even less chance of getting his salary paid than when

he had refused it before, he accepted the post, explaining that he took this
step because there was now no need for him to leave Milan, or danger that
he would be rated as an itinerant teacher. It is not improbable that he may
have been led to accept the office on account of the additional dignity it
would give to him as a practising physician. When, a little later on, the
authorities began to talk of returning to Pavia, he was in no mind to follow
them, giving as a reason that, were he to leave Milan, he would lose his
stipend for the Plat lectureship, and be put to great trouble in the transport
of his household, and perhaps suffer in reputation as well. The Senate was
evidently anxious to retain his services. They bade him consider the matter,
promising to send on a certain date to learn his decision; and, as fate would
have it, the question was conveniently decided for him by a portent.
"On the night before the day upon which my answer was to be sent to the
Senate to say what course I was going to take, the whole of the house fell
down into a heap of ruins, and no single thing was left unwrecked, save the
bed in which I and my wife and my children were sleeping. Thus the step,
which I should never have taken of my own free will or without some sign,
I was compelled to take by the course of events. This thing caused great
wonder to all those who heard of it."[80]
This was in 1544. Jerome hesitated no longer, and went forthwith to Pavia
as Professor of Medicine at a salary of two hundred and forty gold crowns
per annum; but, for the first year at least, this salary was not paid; and the
new professor lectured for a time to empty benches; but, as he was at this
time engaged in the final stage of his great work on Algebra, the leisure
granted to him by the neglect of the students must have been most
acceptable. He published at this time a treatise called Contradicentium
Medicorum, and in 1545 his Algebra or Liber Artis Magnæ was issued from
the press by Petreius of Nuremberg. The issue of this book, by which alone
the name of Cardan holds a place in contemporary learning, is connected
with an episode of his life important enough to demand special and detailed
consideration in a separate place.
His practice in medicine was now a fairly lucrative one, but his extravagant
tastes and the many vices with which he charges himself would have made
short work of the largest income he could possibly have earned,
consequently poverty was never far removed from the household. Hitherto

his reputation as a man of letters and a mathematician had exceeded his
fame as a doctor; for, even after he had taken up his residence as Professor
of Medicine at Padua, many applications were made to him for his services
in other branches of learning. It was fortunate indeed that he had let his
reading take a somewhat eclectic course, for medicine at this time seemed
fated to play him false. At the end of 1544 no salary was forthcoming at
Pavia, so he abandoned his class-room, and returned to Milan.
During his residence there, in the summer of 1546, Cardinal Moroni, acting
on behalf of Pope Paul III., made an offer for his services as a teacher of
mathematics, accompanied by terms which, as he himself admits, were not
to be despised; but, as was his wont, he found some reason for demur, and
ultimately refused the offer. In his Harpocratic vein he argued, "This pope is
an old man, a tottering wall, as it were. Why should I abandon a certainty
for an uncertainty?"[81] The certainty he here alludes to must have been the
salary for the Plat lectureship; and, as this emolument was a very small one,
it would appear that he did not rate at a high figure any profits which might
come to him in the future from his acceptance of the Pope's offer; but, as he
admits subsequently, he did not then fully realize the benevolence of the
Cardinal who approached him on the subject, or the magnificent patronage
of the Farnesi.[82] It is quite possible that this refusal of his may have been
caused by a reluctance to quit Milan, the city which had treated him in such
cruel and inhospitable fashion, just at the time when he had become a man
of mark. In the arrogance of success it was doubtless a keen pleasure to let
his fellow-townsmen see that the man upon whom they had heaped insult
after insult for so many years was one who could afford to let Popes and
Cardinals pray for his services in vain. But whatever may have been his
humour, he resolved to remain in Milan; and, as he had no other public duty
to perform except the delivery of the Plat lectures, he had abundant leisure
to spend upon the many and important works he had on hand at this season.
Cardan had now achieved European fame, and was apparently on the high
road to fortune, but on the very threshold of his triumph a great sorrow and
misfortune befell him, the full effect of which he did not experience all at
once. In the closing days of 1546 he lost his wife. There is very scant record
of her life and character in any of her husband's writings,[83] although he
wrote at great length concerning her father; and the few words that are to be

found here and there favour the view that she was a good wife and mother.
That Jerome could have been an easy husband to live with under any
circumstances it is hard to believe. Lucia's life, had it been prolonged, might
have been more free of trouble as the wife of a famous and wealthy
physician; but it was her ill fortune to be the companion of her husband
only in those dreary, terrible days at Sacco and Gallarate, and in the years of
uncertainty which followed the final return to Milan. In the last-named
period there was at least the Plat lectureship standing between them and
starvation; but children increased the while in the nursery, and manuscripts
in the desk of the physician without patients, and Lucia's short life was all
consumed in this weary time of waiting for fame and fortune which, albeit
hovering near, seemed destined to mock and delude the seeker to the end.
Cardan was before all else a man of books and of the study, and it is not
rare to find that one of this sort makes a harsh unsympathetic husband. The
qualities which he attributes to himself in his autobiography suggest that to
live with a man cursed with such a nature would have been difficult even in
prosperity, and intolerable in trouble and privation. But fretful and irascible
as Cardan shows himself to have been, there was a warm-hearted,
affectionate side to his nature. He was capable of steadfast devotion to all
those to whom his love had ever been given. His reverence for the memory
of his tyrannical and irascible father had been noted already, and a still more
remarkable instance of his fidelity and love will have to be considered when
the time comes to deal with the crowning tragedy of his life. If Cardan had
this tender side to his nature, if he could speak tolerant and even laudatory
words concerning such a father as Fazio Cardano, and show evidences of a
love strong as death in the fight he made for the life of his ill-starred and
unworthy son, it may be hoped—in spite of his almost unnatural silence
concerning her—that he gave Lucia some of that tenderness and sympathy
which her life of hard toil and heavy sacrifice so richly deserved; and that
even in the days when he sold her trinkets to pay his gambling losses, she
was not destined to weep the bitter tears of a neglected wife. If her early
married life had been full of care and travail, if she died when a better day
seemed to be dawning, she was at least spared the supreme sorrow and
disgrace which was destined to fall so soon upon the household. Judging by
what subsequently happened, it will perhaps be held that fate, in cutting her
thread of life, was kinder to her than to her husband, when it gave him a
longer term of years under the sun.

FOOTNOTES:
[67] De Libris Propriis, Opera, tom. i. p. 102.
[68] Besides the De Malo Medendi Usu, he published in 1536 a tract upon
judicial astrology. This, in an enlarged form, was reprinted by Petreius at
Nuremburg in 1542.
[69] Cardan writes of Brissac: "Erat enim Brissacus Prorex singularis in
studiosis amoris et humanitatis."—De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. 14.
[70] "Mirumque in modum venenis cornu ejus adversari creditur."—De
Subtilitate, p. 315. Sir Thomas Browne (Vulgar Errors, Bk. iii. 23) deals at
length with the pretended virtues of the horn, and in the Bestiary of Philip de
Thaun (Popular Treatises on Science during the Middle Ages) is given an
account of the many wonderful qualities of the beast.
[71] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxiii. p. 105. He also alludes to this case in De Libris
Propriis (Opera, tom. i. p. 65), affirming that the other doctors concerned in the
case raised a great prejudice against him on account of his reputation as an
astrologer. "Ita tot modis et insanus paupertate, et Astrologus profitendo
edendoque libros, et imperitus casu illustris pueri, et modum alium medendi
observans ex titulo libri nuper edito, jam prope ab omnibus habebar. Atque hæc
omnia in Urbe omnium nugacissima, et quæ calumniis maximè patet."
[72] The founder of this family was Indico d'Avalos, a Spanish gentleman, who
was chosen by Alfonso of Naples as a husband for Antonella, the daughter and
heiress of the great Marchese Pescara of Aquino. This d'Avalos Marchese dal
Guasto was the grandson of Indico. He commanded the advanced guard at the
battle of Pavia, and took part in almost every battle between the French and
Imperialists, and went with the Emperor to Tunis in 1535. Though he was a
brave soldier and a skilful tactician, he was utterly defeated by d'Enghien at
Cerisoles in 1544. He has been taxed with treachery in the case of the attack
upon the messengers Rincon and Fregoso, who were carrying letters from
Francis I. to the Sultan during a truce, but he did little more than imitate the
tactics used by the French against himself; moreover, neither of the murdered
men was a French subject, or had the status of an ambassador. D'Avalos was a
liberal patron of letters and arts, and was very popular as Governor of Milan. He
was a noted gallant and a great dandy. Brantôme writes of him—"qu'il était si
dameret qu'il parfumait jusqu'aux selles de ses chevaux."—He died in 1546.
[73] "Violentia quorundam Medicorum adactus sum anno MDXXXVI, seu
XXXVII, turpi conditione pacisci cum Collegio, sed ut dixi, postmodum
dissoluta est, anno MDXXXIX et restitutus sum integrè."—De Vita Propria, ch.
xxxiii. p. 105.
[74] De Vita Propria, ch. xl. p. 133.—He gives a long list of cases of his
successful treatment in Opera, tom. i. p. 82.
[75] There is a full account of this episode in De Libris Propriis, p. 128, and in
De Vita Propria, ch. xl. p. 133.

[76] Exotericarum exercitationum, p. 987.
[77] Cardanus Comforte, translated into Englishe, 1573. It was the work of
Thomas Bedingfield, a gentleman pensioner of Queen Elizabeth.
[78] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxvii. p. 116.
[79] "Delectant me gladii parvi, seu styli scriptorii, in quos plus viginti coronatis
aureis impendi: multas etiam pecunias in varia pennarum genera, audeo dicere
apparatum ad scribendum ducentis coronatis non potuisse emi."—De Vita
Propria, ch. xviii. p. 57.
[80] De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. 15.
[81] "At ego qui, ut dixi, Harpocraticus sum dicebam:—Summus Pont:
decrepitus est: murus ruinosus, certa pro incertis derelinquam?"—De Vita
Propria, ch. iv. p. 15. It is quite possible that Paul III. may have desired to have
Cardan about him on account of his reputation as an astrologer, the Pope being a
firm believer in the influence of the stars.—Vide Ranke, History of the Popes i.
166.
[82] "Neque ego tum Moroni probitatem, nec Pharnesiorum splendorem
intelligebam."—De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. 15.
[83] In writing of his own horoscope (Geniturarum Exempla, p. 461) he records
that she miscarried thrice, brought forth three living children, and lived with him
fifteen years. He dismisses his marriage as follows: "Duxi uxorem inexpectato, a
quo tempore multa adversa concomitata sunt."—De Vita Propria, ch. xli. p. 149.
But in De Rerum Subtilitate, p. 375, he records his grief at her death:—"Itaque
cum a luctu dolor et vigilia invadere soleant, ut mihi anno vertente in morte
uxoris Luciæ Bandarenæ quanquam institutis philosophiæ munitus essem,
repugnante tamen natura, memorque vinculi cōjugalis, suspiriis ac lachrymis et
inedia quinque dierum, a periculo me vindicavi."

CHAPTER V
At this point it may not be inopportune to make a break in the record of
Cardan's life and work, and to treat in retrospect of that portion of his time
which he spent in the composition of his treatises on Arithmetic and
Algebra. Ever since 1535 he had been working intermittently at one or other
of these, but it would have been impossible to deal coherently and
effectively with the growth and completion of these two books—really the
most important of all he left behind him—while chronicling the goings and
comings of a life so adventurous as that of the author.
The prime object of Cardan's ambition was eminence as a physician. But,
during the long years of waiting, while the action of the Milanese doctors
kept him outside the bounds of their College, and even after this had been
opened to him without inducing ailing mortals to call for his services, he
would now and again fall into a transport of rage against his persecutors,
and of contempt for the public which refused to recognize him as a master
of his art, and cast aside his medical books for months at a time, devoting
himself diligently to Mathematics, the field of learning which, next to
Medicine, attracted him most powerfully. His father Fazio was a
geometrician of repute and a student of applied mathematics, and, though
his first desire was to make his son a jurisconsult, he gave Jerome in early
youth a fairly good grounding in arithmetic and geometry, deeming
probably that such training would not prove a bad discipline for an intellect
destined to attack those formidable tomes within which lurked the mysteries
of the Canon and Civil Law. Mathematical learning has given to Cardan his
surest title to immortality, and at the outset of his career he found in
mathematics rather than in medicine the first support in the arduous battle
he had to wage with fortune. His appointment to the Plat lectureship at
Milan has already been noted. In the discharge of his new duties he was
bound, according to the terms of the endowment of the Plat lecturer, to
teach the sciences of geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy, and he began his
course upon the lines laid down by the founder. Few listeners came,
however, and at this juncture Cardan took a step which serves to show how
real was his devotion to the cause of true learning, and how lightly he

thought of an additional burden upon his own back, if this cause could be
helped forward thereby. Keenly as he enjoyed his mathematical work, he
laid a part of it aside when he perceived that the benches before him were
empty, and, by way of making his lectures more attractive, he occasionally
substituted geography for geometry, and architecture for arithmetic. The
necessary research and the preparation of these lectures led naturally to the
accumulation of a large mass of notes, and as these increased under his
hand Jerome began to consider whether it might not be worth his while to
use them in the composition of one or more volumes. In 1535 he delivered
as Plat lecturer his address, the Encomium Geometriæ, which he followed
up shortly after by the publication of a work, Quindecim Libri Novæ
Geometriæ. But the most profitable labour of these years was that which
produced his first important book, The Practice of Arithmetic and Simple
Mensuration, which was published in 1539, a venture which brought to the
author a reward of ten crowns.[84] It was a well-planned and well-arranged
manual, giving proof of the wide erudition and sense of proportion
possessed by the author. Besides dealing with Arithmetic as understood by
the modern school-boy, it discusses certain astronomical operations,
multiplication by memory, the mysteries of the Roman and Ecclesiastical
Calendars, and gives rules for the solution of any problem arising from the
terms of the same. It treats of partnership in agriculture, the Mezzadria
system still prevalent in Tuscany and in other parts of Italy, of the value of
money, of the strange properties of certain numbers, and gives the first
simple rules of Algebra to serve as stepping-stones to the higher
mathematics. It ends with information as to house-rent, letters of credit and
exchange, tables of interest, games of chance, mensuration, and weights and
measures. In an appendix Cardan examines critically the work of Fra Luca
Pacioli da Borgo, an earlier writer on the subject, and points out numerous
errors in the same. The book from beginning to end shows signs of careful
study and compilation, and the fame which it brought to its author was well
deserved.
Cardan appended to the Arithmetic a printed notice which may be regarded
as an early essay in advertising. He was fully convinced that his works were
valuable and quite worth the sums of money he asked for them; the world
was blind, perhaps wilfully, to their merits, therefore he now determined
that it should no longer be able to quote ignorance of the author as an

excuse for not buying the book. This appendix was a notification to the
learned men of Europe that the writer of the Practice of Arithmetic had in
his press at home thirty-four other works in MS. which they might read
with profit, and that of these only two had been printed, to wit the De Malo
Medendi Usu and a tract on Simples. This advertisement had something of
the character of a legal document, for it invoked the authority of the
Emperor to protect the copyright of Cardan's books within the Duchy of
Milan for ten years, and to prevent the introduction of them from abroad.
The Arithmetic proved far superior to any other treatise extant, and
everywhere won the approval of the learned. It was from Nuremberg that its
appearance brought the most valuable fruits. Andreas Osiander,[85] a learned
humanist and a convert to Lutheranism, and Johannes Petreius, an eminent
printer, were evidently impressed by the terms of Cardan's advertisement,
for they wrote to him and offered in combination to edit and print any of the
books awaiting publication in his study at Milan. The result of this offer
was the reprinting of De Malo Medendi, and subsequently of the tract on
Judicial Astrology, and of the treatise De Consolatione; the Book of the
Great Art, the treatises De Sapientia and De Immortalitate Animorum were
published in the first instance by these same patrons from the Nuremberg
press.
But Cardan, while he was hard at work on his Arithmetic, had not forgotten
a certain report which had caused no slight stir in the world of Mathematics
some three years before the issue of his book on Arithmetic, an episode
which may be most fittingly told in his own words. "At this time[86] it
happened that there came to Milan a certain Brescian named Giovanni
Colla, a man of tall stature, and very thin, pale, swarthy, and hollow-eyed.
He was of gentle manners, slow in gait, sparing of his words, full of talent,
and skilled in mathematics. His business was to bring word to me that there
had been recently discovered two new rules in Algebra for the solution of
problems dealing with cubes and numbers. I asked him who had found them
out, whereupon he told me the name of the discoverer was Scipio Ferreo of
Bologna. 'And who else knows these rules?' I said. He answered, 'Niccolo
Tartaglia and Antonio Maria Fiore.' And indeed some time later Tartaglia,
when he came to Milan, explained them to me, though unwillingly; and
afterwards I myself, when working with Ludovico Ferrari,[87] made a

thorough study of the rules aforesaid. We devised certain others, heretofore
unnoticed, after we had made trial of these new rules, and out of this
material I put together my Book of the Great Art."[88]
Before dealing with the events which led to the composition of the famous
work above-named, it may be permitted to take a rapid survey of the
condition of Algebra at the time when Cardan sat down to write. Up to the
beginning of the sixteenth century the knowledge of Algebra in Italy,
originally derived from Greek and Arabic sources, had made very little
progress, and the science had been developed no farther than to provide for
the solution of equations of the first or second degree.[89] In the preface to
the Liber Artis Magnæ Cardan writes:—"This art takes its origin from a
certain Mahomet, the son of Moses, an Arabian, a fact to which Leonard the
Pisan bears ample testimony. He left behind him four rules, with his
demonstrations of the same, which I duly ascribe to him in their proper
place. After a long interval of time, some student, whose identity is
uncertain, deduced from the original four rules three others, which Luca
Paciolus put with the original ones into his book. Then three more were
discovered from the original rules, also by some one unknown, but these
attracted very little notice though they were far more useful than the others,
seeing that they taught how to arrive at the value of the cubus and the
numerus and of the cubus quadratus.[90] But in recent times Scipio Ferreo
of Bologna discovered the rule of the cubus and the res equal to the
numerus (x3 + px=q), truly a beautiful and admirable discovery. For this
Algebraic art outdoes all other subtlety of man, and outshines the clearest
exposition mortal wit can achieve: a heavenly gift indeed, and a test of the
powers of a man's mind. So excellent is it in itself that whosoever shall get
possession thereof, will be assured that no problem exists too difficult for
him to disentangle. As a rival of Ferreo, Niccolo Tartaglia of Brescia, my
friend, at that time when he engaged in a contest with Antonio Maria Fiore,
the pupil of Ferreo, made out this same rule to help secure the victory, and
this rule he imparted to me after I had diligently besought him thereanent. I,
indeed, had been deceived by the words of Luca Paciolus, who denied that
there could be any general rule besides these which he had published, so I
was not moved to seek that which I despaired of finding; but, having made
myself master of Tartaglia's method of demonstration, I understood how
many other results might be attained; and, having taken fresh courage, I

worked these out, partly by myself and partly by the aid of Ludovico
Ferrari, a former pupil of mine. Now all the discoveries made by the men
aforesaid are here marked with their names. Those unsigned were found out
by me; and the demonstrations are all mine, except three discovered by
Mahomet and two by Ludovico."[91]
This is Cardan's account of the scheme and origin of his book, and the
succeeding pages will be mainly an amplification thereof. The earliest work
on Algebra used in Italy was a translation of the MS. treatise of Mahommed
ben Musa of Corasan, and next in order is a MS. written by a certain
Leonardo da Pisa in 1202. Leonardo was a trader, who had learned the art
during his voyages to Barbary, and his treatise and that of Mahommed were
the sole literature on the subject up to the year 1494, when Fra Luca Pacioli
da Borgo[92] brought out his volume treating of Arithmetic and Algebra as
well. This was the first printed work on the subject.
After the invention of printing the interest in Algebra grew rapidly. From
the time of Leonardo to that of Fra Luca it had remained stationary. The
important fact that the resolution of all the cases of a problem may be
comprehended in a simple formula, which may be obtained from the
solution of one of its cases merely by a change of the signs, was not known,
but in 1505 the Scipio Ferreo alluded to by Cardan, a Bolognese professor,
discovered the rule for the solution of one case of a compound cubic
equation. This was the discovery that Giovanni Colla announced when he
went to Milan in 1536.
Cardan was then working hard at his Arithmetic—which dealt also with
elementary Algebra—and he was naturally anxious to collect in its pages
every item of fresh knowledge in the sphere of mathematics which might
have been discovered since the publication of the last treatise. The fact that
Algebra as a science had made such scant progress for so many years, gave
to this new process, about which Giovanni Colla was talking, an
extraordinary interest in the sight of all mathematical students; wherefore
when Cardan heard the report that Antonio Maria Fiore, Ferreo's pupil, had
been entrusted by his master with the secret of this new process, and was
about to hold a public disputation at Venice with Niccolo Tartaglia, a
mathematician of considerable repute, he fancied that possibly there would
be game about well worth the hunting.

Fiore had already challenged divers opponents of less weight in the other
towns of Italy, but now that he ventured to attack the well-known Brescian
student, mathematicians began to anticipate an encounter of more than
common interest. According to the custom of the time, a wager was laid on
the result of the contest, and it was settled as a preliminary that each one of
the competitors should ask of the other thirty questions. For several weeks
before the time fixed for the contest Tartaglia studied hard; and such good
use did he make of his time that, when the day of the encounter came, he
not only fathomed the formula upon which Fiore's hopes were based, but,
over and beyond this, elaborated two other cases of his own which neither
Fiore nor his master Ferreo had ever dreamt of.
The case which Ferreo had solved by some unknown process was the
equation x3 + px = q, and the new forms of cubic equation which Tartaglia
elaborated were as follows: x3 + px2 = q: and x3 - px2 = q. Before the date of
the meeting, Tartaglia was assured that the victory would be his, and Fiore
was probably just as confident. Fiore put his questions, all of which hinged
upon the rule of Ferreo which Tartaglia had already mastered, and these
questions his opponent answered without difficulty; but when the turn of
the other side came, Tartaglia completely puzzled the unfortunate Fiore,
who managed indeed to solve one of Tartaglia's questions, but not till after
all his own had been answered. By this triumph the fame of Tartaglia spread
far and wide, and Jerome Cardan, in consequence of the rumours of the
Brescian's extraordinary skill, became more anxious than ever to become a
sharer in the wonderful secret by means of which he had won his victory.
Cardan was still engaged in working up his lecture notes on Arithmetic into
the Treatise when this contest took place; but it was not till four years later,
in 1539, that he took any steps towards the prosecution of his design. If he
knew anything of Tartaglia's character, and it is reasonable to suppose that
he did, he would naturally hesitate to make any personal appeal to him, and
trust to chance to give him an opportunity of gaining possession of the
knowledge aforesaid, rather than seek it at the fountain-head. Tartaglia was
of very humble birth, and according to report almost entirely self-educated.
Through a physical injury which he met with in childhood his speech was
affected; and, according to the common Italian usage, a nickname[93] which
pointed to this infirmity was given to him. The blow on the head, dealt to

him by some French soldier at the sack of Brescia in 1512, may have made
him a stutterer, but it assuredly did not muddle his wits; nevertheless, as the
result of this knock, or for some other cause, he grew up into a churlish,
uncouth, and ill-mannered man, and, if the report given of him by
Papadopoli[94] at the end of his history be worthy of credit, one not to be
entirely trusted as an autobiographer in the account he himself gives of his
early days in the preface to one of his works. Papadopoli's notice of him
states that he was in no sense the self-taught scholar he represented himself
to be, but that he was indebted for some portion at least of his training to the
beneficence of a gentleman named Balbisono,[95] who took him to Padua to
study. From the passage quoted below he seems to have failed to win the
goodwill of the Brescians, and to have found Venice a city more to his taste.
It is probable that the contest with Fiore took place after his final
withdrawal from his birthplace to Venice.
In 1537 Tartaglia published a treatise on Artillery, but he gave no sign of
making public to the world his discoveries in Algebra. Cardan waited on,
but the morose Brescian would not speak, and at last he determined to make
a request through a certain Messer Juan Antonio, a bookseller, that, in the
interests of learning, he might be made a sharer of Tartaglia's secret.
Tartaglia has given a version of this part of the transaction; and, according
to what is there set down, Cardan's request, even when recorded in
Tartaglia's own words, does not appear an unreasonable one, for up to this
time Tartaglia had never announced that he had any intention of publishing
his discoveries as part of a separate work on Mathematics. There was
indeed a good reason why he should refrain from doing this in the fact that
he could only speak and write Italian, and that in the Brescian dialect, being
entirely ignorant of Latin, the only tongue which the writer of a
mathematical work could use with any hope of success. Tartaglia's record of
his conversation with Messer Juan Antonio, the emissary employed by
Cardan, and of all the subsequent details of the controversy, is preserved in
his principal work, Quesiti et Inventioni Diverse de Nicolo Tartalea
Brisciano,[96] a record which furnishes abundant and striking instance of his
jealous and suspicious temper. Much of it is given in the form of dialogue,
the terms of which are perhaps a little too precise to carry conviction of its
entire sincerity and spontaneity. It was probably written just after the final
cause of quarrel in 1545, and its main object seems to be to set the author

right in the sight of the world, and to exhibit Cardan as a meddlesome
fellow not to be trusted, and one ignorant of the very elements of the art he
professed to teach.[97]
The inquiry begins with a courteously worded request from Messer Juan
Antonio (speaking on behalf of Messer Hieronimo Cardano), that Messer
Niccolo would make known to his principal the rule by means of which he
had made such short work of Antonio Fiore's thirty questions. It had been
told to Messer Hieronimo that Fiore's thirty questions had led up to a case
of the cosa and the cubus equal to the numerus, and that Messer Niccolo
had discovered a general rule for such case. Messer Hieronimo now
especially desired to be taught this rule. If the inventor should be willing to
let this rule be published, it should be published as his own discovery; but,
if he were not disposed to let the same be made known to the world, it
should be kept a profound secret. To this request Tartaglia replied that, if at
any time he might publish his rule, he would give it to the world in a work
of his own under his own name, whereupon Juan Antonio moderated his
demand, and begged to be furnished merely with a copy of the thirty
questions preferred by Fiore, and Tartaglia's solutions of the same; but
Messer Niccolo was too wary a bird to be taken with such a lure as this. To
grant so much, he replied, would be to tell everything, inasmuch as Cardan
could easily find out the rule, if he should be furnished with a single
question and its solution. Next Juan Antonio handed to Tartaglia eight
algebraical questions which had been confided to him by Cardan, and asked
for answers to them; but Tartaglia, having glanced at them, declared that
they were not framed by Cardan at all, but by Giovanni Colla. Colla, he
declared, had sent him one of these questions for solution some two years
ago. Another, he (Tartaglia) had given to Colla, together with a solution
thereof. Juan Antonio replied by way of contradiction—somewhat lamely—
that the questions had been handed over to him by Cardan and no one else,
wishing to maintain, apparently, that no one else could possibly have been
concerned in them, whereupon Tartaglia replied that, supposing the
questions had been given by Cardan to Juan Antonio his messenger, Cardan
must have got the questions from Colla, and have sent them on to him
(Tartaglia) for solution because he could not arrive at the meaning of them
himself. He waved aside Juan Antonio's perfectly irrelevant and fatuous
protests—that Cardan would not in any case have sent these questions if

they had been framed by another person, or if he had been unable to solve
them. Tartaglia, on the other hand, declared that Cardan certainly did not
comprehend them. If he did not know the rule by which Fiore's questions
had been answered (that of the cosa and the cubus equal to the numerus),
how could he solve these questions which he now sent, seeing that certain
of them involved operations much more complicated than that of the rule
above written? If he understood the questions which he now sent for
solution, he could not want to be taught this rule. Then Juan Antonio
moderated his demand still farther, and said he would be satisfied with a
copy of the questions which Fiore had put to Tartaglia, adding that the
favour would be much greater if Tartaglia's own questions were also given.
He probably felt that it would be mere waste of breath to beg again for
Tartaglia's answers. The end of the matter was that Tartaglia handed over to
the messenger the questions which Fiore had propounded in the Venetian
contest, and authorized Juan Antonio to get a copy of his own from the
notary who had drawn up the terms of the disputation with Fiore. The date
of this communication is January 2, 1539, and on February 12 Cardan
writes a long letter to Tartaglia, complaining in somewhat testy spirit of the
reception given to his request. He is aggrieved that Tartaglia should have
sent him nothing but the questions put to him by Fiore, thirty in number
indeed, but only one in substance, and that he should have dared to hint that
those which he (Cardan) had sent for solution were not his own, but the
property of Giovanni Colla. Cardan had found Colla to be a conceited fool,
and had dragged the conceit out of him—a process which he was now about
to repeat for the benefit of Messer Niccolo Tartaglia. The letter goes on to
contradict all Tartaglia's assertions by arguments which do not seem entirely
convincing, and the case is not made better by the abusive passages
interpolated here and there, and by the demonstration of certain errors in
Tartaglia's book on Artillery. In short a more injudicious letter could not
have been written by any man hoping to get a favour done to him by the
person addressed.
In the special matter of the problems which he sent to Tartaglia by the
bookseller Juan Antonio, Cardan made a beginning of that tricky and
crooked course which he followed too persistently all through this
particular business. In his letter he maintains with a show of indignation
that he had long known these questions, had known them in fact before

Colla knew how to count ten, implying by these words that he knew how to
solve them, while in reality all he knew about them was the fact that they
existed. Tartaglia in his answer is not to be moved from his belief, and tells
Cardan flatly that he is still convinced Giovanni Colla took the questions to
Milan, where he found no one able to solve them, not even Messer
Hieronimo Cardano, and that the mathematician last-named sent them on by
the bookseller for solution, as has been already related.
This letter of Tartaglia's bears the date of February 13, 1539, and after
reading it and digesting its contents, Cardan seems to have come to the
conclusion that he was not working in the right way to get possession of
this secret which he felt he must needs master, if he wanted his forthcoming
book to mark a new epoch in this History of Mathematics, and that a change
of tactics was necessary. Alfonso d'Avalos, Cardan's friend and patron, was
at this time the Governor of Milan. D'Avalos was a man of science, as well
as a soldier, and Cardan had already sent to him a copy of Tartaglia's
treatise on Artillery, deeming that a work of this kind would not fail to
interest him. In his first letter to Tartaglia he mentions this fact, while
picking holes in the writer's theories concerning transmitted force and views
on gravitation. This mention of the name of D'Avalos, the master of many
legions and of many cannons as well, to a man who had written a Treatise
on the management of Artillery, and devised certain engines and
instruments for the management of the same, was indeed a clever cast, and
the fly was tempting enough to attract even so shy a fish as Niccolo
Tartaglia. In his reply to Jerome's scolding letter of February 12, 1539,
Tartaglia concludes with a description of the instruments which he was
perfecting: a square to regulate the discharge of cannon, and to level and
determine every elevation; and another instrument for the investigation of
distances upon a plane surface. He ends with a request that Cardan will
accept four copies of the engines aforesaid, two for himself and two for the
Marchese d'Avalos.
The tone of this letter shows that Cardan had at least begun to tame the
bear, who now seemed disposed to dance ad libitum to the pleasant music
of words suggesting introductions to the governor, and possible patronage
of these engines for the working of artillery. Cardan's reply of March 19,
1539, is friendly—too friendly indeed—and the wonder is that Tartaglia's
suspicions were not aroused by its almost sugary politeness. It begins with

an attempt to soften down the asperities of their former correspondence,
some abuse of Giovanni Colla, and an apology for the rough words of his
last epistle. Cardan then shows how their misunderstanding arose chiefly
from a blunder made by Juan Antonio in delivering the message, and invites
Tartaglia to come and visit him in his own house in Milan, so that they
might deliberate together on mathematical questions; but the true
significance of the letter appears in the closing lines. "I told the Marchese of
the instruments which you had sent him, and he showed himself greatly
pleased with all you had done. And he commanded me to write to you
forthwith in pressing terms, and to tell you that, on the receipt of my letter,
you should come to Milan without fail, for he desires to speak with you.
And I, too, exhort you to come at once without further deliberation, seeing
that this said Marchese is wonted to reward all men of worth in such noble
and magnanimous and liberal fashion that none of them ever goes away
dissatisfied."
The receipt of this letter seems to have disquieted Tartaglia somewhat; for
he has added a note to it, in which he says that Cardan has placed him in a
position of embarrassment. He had evidently wished for an introduction to
D'Avalos, but now it was offered to him it seemed a burden rather than a
benefit. He disliked the notion of going to Milan; yet, if he did not go, the
Marchese d'Avalos might take offence. But in the end he decided to
undertake the journey; and, as D'Avalos happened then to be absent from
Milan on a visit to his country villa at Vigevano, he stayed for three days in
Cardan's house. As a recorder of conversations Tartaglia seems to have had
something of Boswell's gift. He gives an abstract of an eventful dialogue
with his host on March 25, 1539, which Cardan begins by a gentle reproach
anent his guest's reticence in the matter of the rule of the cosa and the cubus
equal to the numerus. Tartaglia's reply to this complaint seems reasonable
enough (it must be borne in mind that he is his own reporter), and certainly
helps to absolve him from the charge sometimes made against him that he
was nothing more than a selfish curmudgeon who had resolved to let his
knowledge die with him, rather than share it with other mathematicians of
whom he was jealous. He told Cardan plainly that he kept his rules a secret
because, for the present, it suited his purpose to do so. At this time he had
not the leisure to elaborate farther the several rules in question, being
engaged over a translation of Euclid into Italian; but, when this work should

be completed, he proposed to publish a treatise on Algebra in which he
would disclose to the world all the rules he already knew, as well as many
others which he hoped to discover in the course of his present work. He
concludes: "This is the cause of my seeming discourtesy towards your
excellency. I have been all the ruder, perhaps, because you write to me that
you are preparing a book similar to mine, and that you propose to publish
my inventions, and to give me credit for the same. This I confess is not to
my taste, forasmuch as I wish to set forth my discoveries in my own works,
and not in those of others." In his reply to this, Cardan points out that he
had promised, if Tartaglia so desired, that he would not publish the rules at
all; but here Messer Niccolo's patience and good manners gave way, and he
told Messer Hieronimo bluntly that he did not believe him. Then said
Cardan: "I swear to you by the Sacred Evangel, and by myself as a
gentleman, that I will not only abstain from publishing your discoveries—if
you will make them known to me—but that I will promise and pledge my
faith of a true Christian to set them down for my own use in cypher, so that
after my death no one may be able to understand them. If you will believe
this promise, believe it; if you will not, let us have done with the matter." "If
I were not disposed to believe such oaths as these you now swear," said
Tartaglia, "I might as well be set down as a man without any faith at all. I
have determined to go forthwith to Vigevano to visit the Signor Marchese,
as I have now been here for three days and am weary of the delay, but I
promise when I return that I will show you all the rules." Cardan replied:
"As you are bent on going to Vigevano, I will give you a letter of
introduction to the Marchese, so that he may know who you are; but I
would that, before you start, you show me the rule as you have promised."
"I am willing to do this," said Tartaglia, "but I must tell you that, in order to
be able to recall at any time my system of working, I have expressed it in
rhyme; because, without this precaution, I must often have forgotten it. I
care naught that my rhymes are clumsy, it has been enough for me that they
have served to remind me of my rules. These I will write down with my
own hand, so that you may be assured that my discovery is given to you
correctly." Then follow Tartaglia's verses:

"Quando chel cubo con le cose apresso
Se agualia à qualche numero discreto
Trouan dui altri differenti in esso

Dapoi terrai questo per consueto
Ch'el lor' produtto sempre sia eguale
Al terzo cubo delle cose neto
El residuo poi suo generale
Delli lor lati cubi ben sottratti
Varra la tua cosa principale.
In el secondo de cotesti atti
Quando chel cubo restasse lui solo
Tu osseruarai quest' altri contratti
Del numer farai due tal part 'a uolo
Che luna in l'altra si produca schietto
El terzo cubo delle cose in stolo
Delle qual poi, per commun precetto
Torrai li lati cubi insieme gionti
Et cotal summa sara il tuo concetto
Et terzo poi de questi nostri conti
Se solve col recordo se ben guardi
Che per natura son quasi congionti
Questi trouai, et non con passi tardi
Nel mille cinquecent' e quatro è trenta
Con fondamenti ben sald' è gagliardi
Nella citta del mar' intorno centa."
Having handed over to his host these rhymes, with the precious rules
enshrined therein, Tartaglia told him that, with so clear an exposition, he
could not fail to understand them, ending with a warning hint to Cardan
that, if he should publish the rules, either in the work he had in hand, or in
any future one, either under the name of Tartaglia or of Cardan, he, the
author, would put into print certain things which Messer Hieronimo would
not find very pleasant reading.
After all Tartaglia was destined to quit Milan without paying his respects to
D'Avalos. There is not a word in his notes which gives the reason of this
eccentric action on his part. He simply says that he is no longer inclined to
go to Vigevano, but has made up his mind to return to Venice forthwith; and
Cardan, probably, was not displeased at this exhibition of petulant
impatience on the part of his guest, but was rather somewhat relieved to see
Messer Niccolo ride away, now that he had extracted from him the coveted

information. From the beginning to the end of this affair Cardan has been
credited with an amount of subtle cunning which he assuredly did not
manifest at other times when his wits were pitted for contest with those of
other men. It has been advanced to his disparagement that he walked in
deceitful ways from the very beginning; that he dangled before Tartaglia's
eyes the prospect of gain and preferment simply for the purpose of enticing
him to Milan, where he deemed he might use more efficaciously his
arguments for the accomplishment of the purpose which was really in his
mind; that he had no intention of advancing Tartaglia's fortunes when he
suggested the introduction to D'Avalos, but that the Governor of Milan was
brought into the business merely that he might be used as a potent ally in
the attack upon Tartaglia's obstinate silence. Whether this may have been
his line of action or not, the issue shows that he was fully able to fight his
battle alone, and that his powers of persuasion and hard swearing were
adequate when occasion arose for their exercise. It is quite possible that
Tartaglia, when he began to reflect over what he had done by writing out
and handing over to Cardan his mnemonic rhymes, fell into an access of
suspicious anger—at Cardan for his wheedling persistency, and at himself
for yielding thereto—and packed himself off in a rage with the
determination to have done with Messer Hieronimo and all his works.
Certainly his carriage towards Cardan in the weeks ensuing, as exhibited in
his correspondence, does not picture him in an amiable temper. On April 9
Jerome wrote to him in a very friendly strain, expressing regret that his
guest should have left Milan without seeing D'Avalos, and fear lest he
might have prejudiced his fortunes by taking such a step. He then goes on to
describe to Tartaglia the progress he is making in his work with the Practice
of Arithmetic, and to ask him for help in solving one of the cases in
Algebra, the rule for which was indeed contained in Tartaglia's verses, but
expressed somewhat obscurely, for which reason Cardan had missed its
meaning.[98] In his reply, Tartaglia ignores Jerome's courtesies altogether,
and tells him that what he especially desires at the present moment is a sight
of that volume on the Practice of Arithmetic, "for," says he, "if I do not see
it soon, I shall begin to suspect that this work of yours will probably make
manifest some breach of faith; in other words, that it will contain as
interpolations certain of the rules I taught you." Niccolo then goes on to
explain the difficulty which had puzzled Cardan, using terms which showed

plainly that he had as poor an opinion of his correspondent's wit as of his
veracity.
Cardan was an irascible man, and it is a high tribute to his powers of
restraint that he managed to keep his temper under the uncouth insults of
such a letter as the foregoing. The more clearly Tartaglia's jealous,
suspicious nature displays itself, the greater seems the wonder that a man of
such a disposition should ever have disclosed such a secret. He did not
believe Cardan when he promised that he would not publish the rules in
question without his (the discoverer's) consent—why then did he believe
him when he swore by the Gospel? The age was one in which the binding
force of an oath was not regarded as an obligation of any particular sanctity
if circumstances should arise which made the violation of the oath more
convenient than its observance. However, the time was not yet come for
Jerome to begin to quibble with his conscience. On May 12, 1539, he wrote
another letter to Tartaglia, also in a very friendly tone, reproaching him
gently for his suspicions, and sending a copy of the Practice of Arithmetic
to show him that they were groundless. He protested that Tartaglia might
search from beginning to end without finding any trace of his jealously-
guarded rules, inasmuch as, beyond correcting a few errors, the writer had
only carried Algebra to the point where Fra Luca had left it. Tartaglia
searched, and though he could not put his finger on any spot which showed
that Messer Hieronimo had broken his oath, he found what must have been
to him as a precious jewel, to wit a mistake in reckoning, which he reported
to Cardan in these words:
"In this process your excellency has made such a gross mistake that I am
amazed thereat, forasmuch as any man with half an eye must have seen it—
indeed, if you had not gone on to repeat it in divers examples, I should have
set it down to a mistake of the printer." After pointing out to Cardan the
blunders aforesaid, he concludes: "The whole of this work of yours is
ridiculous and inaccurate, a performance which makes me tremble for your
good name."[99]
Every succeeding page of Tartaglia's notes shows more and more clearly
that he was smarting under a sense of his own folly in having divulged his
secret. Night and day he brooded over his excess of confidence, and as time
went by he let his suspicions of Cardan grow into savage resentment. His

ears were open to every rumour which might pass from one class-room to
another. On July 10 a letter came to him from one Maphio of Bergamo, a
former pupil, telling how Cardan was about to publish certain new
mathematical rules in a book on Algebra, and hinting that in all probability
these rules would prove to be Tartaglia's, whereupon he at once jumped to
the conclusion that Maphio's gossip was the truth, and that this book would
make public the secret which Cardan had sworn to keep. He left many of
Cardan's letters unanswered; but at last he seems to have found too strong
the temptation to say something disagreeable; so, in answer to a letter from
Cardan containing a request for help in solving an equation which had
baffled his skill, Tartaglia wrote telling Cardan that he had bungled in his
application of the rule, and that he himself was now very sorry he had ever
confided the rule aforesaid to such a man. He ends with further abuse of
Cardan's Practice of Arithmetic, which he declares to be merely a confused
farrago of other men's knowledge,[100] and with a remark which he probably
intended to be a crowning insult. "I well remember when I was at your
house in Milan, that you told me you had never tried to discover the rule of
the cosa and the cubus equal to the numerus which was found out by me,
because Fra Luca had declared it to be impossible;[101] as if to say that, if
you had set yourself to the task you could have accomplished it, a thing
which sets me off laughing when I call to mind the fact that it is now two
months since I informed you of the blunders you made in the extraction of
the cube root, which process is one of the first to be taught to students who
are beginning Algebra. Wherefore, if after the lapse of all this time you
have not been able to find a remedy to set right this your mistake (which
would have been an easy matter enough), just consider whether in any case
your powers could have been equal to the discovery of the rule aforesaid."
[102]

In this quarrel Messer Giovanni Colla had appeared as the herald of the
storm, when he carried to Milan in 1536 tidings of the discovery of the new
rule which had put Cardan on the alert, and now, as the crisis approached,
he again came upon the scene, figuring as unconscious and indirect cause of
the final catastrophe. On January 5, 1540, Cardan wrote to Tartaglia, telling
him that Colla had once more appeared in Milan, and was boasting that he
had found out certain new rules in Algebra. He went on to suggest to his
correspondent that they should unite their forces in an attempt to fathom

this asserted discovery of Colla's, but to this letter Tartaglia vouchsafed no
reply. In his diary it stands with a superadded note, in which he remarks that
he thinks as badly of Cardan as of Colla, and that, as far as he is concerned,
they may both of them go whithersoever they will.[103]
Colla propounded divers questions to the Algebraists of Milan, and amongst
them was one involving the equation x4 + 6x2 + 36 = 60x, one which he
probably found in some Arabian treatise. Cardan tried all his ingenuity over
this combination without success, but his brilliant pupil, Ludovico Ferrari,
worked to better purpose, and succeeded at last in solving it by adding to
each side of the equation, arranged in a certain fashion, some quadratic and
simple quantities of which the square root could be extracted.[104] Cardan
seems to have been baffled by the fact that the equation aforesaid could not
be solved by the recently-discovered rules, because it produced a bi-
quadratic. This difficulty Ferrari overcame, and, pursuing the subject, he
discovered a general rule for the solution of all bi-quadratics by means of a
cubic equation. Cardan's subsequent demonstration of this process is one of
the masterpieces of the Book of the Great Art. It is an example of the use of
assuming a new indeterminate quantity to introduce into an equation, thus
anticipating by a considerable space of time Descartes, who subsequently
made use of a like assumption in a like case.
How far this discovery of Ferrari's covered the rules given by Tartaglia to
Cardan, and how far it relieved Cardan of the obligation of secresy, is a
problem fitted for the consideration of the mathematician and the casuist
severally.[105] An apologist of Cardan might affirm that he cannot be held to
have acted in bad faith in publishing the result of Ferrari's discovery. If this
discovery included and even went beyond Tartaglia's, so much the worse for
Tartaglia. The lesser discovery (Tartaglia's) Cardan never divulged before
Ferrari unravelled Giovanni Colla's puzzle; but it was inevitable that it must
be made known to the world as a part of the greater discovery (Ferrari's)
which Cardan was in no way bound to keep a secret. The case might be said
to run on all fours with that where a man confides a secret to a friend under
a promise of silence, which promise the friend keeps religiously, until one
day he finds that the secret, and even more than the secret, is common talk
of the market-place. Is the obligation of silence, with which he was bound
originally, still to lie upon the friend, even when he may have sworn to

observe it by the Holy Evangel and the honour of a gentleman; and is the
fact that great renown and profit would come to him by publishing the
secret to be held as an additional reason for keeping silence, or as a
justification for speech? In forming a judgment after a lapse of three and a
half centuries as to Cardan's action, while having regard both to the sanctity
of an oath at the time in question, and to the altered state of the case
between him and Tartaglia consequent on Ludovico Ferrari's discovery, an
hypothesis not overstrained in the direction of charity may be advanced to
the effect that Cardan might well have deemed he was justified in revealing
to the world the rules which Tartaglia had taught him, considering that these
isolated rules had been developed by his own study and Ferrari's into a
principle by which it would be possible to work a complete revolution in
the science of Algebra.
In any case, six years were allowed to elapse before Cardan, by publishing
Tartaglia's rules in the Book of the Great Art, did the deed which, in the eyes
of many, branded him as a liar and dishonest, and drove Tartaglia almost
wild with rage. That his offence did not meet with universal reprobation is
shown by negative testimony in the Judicium de Cardano, by Gabriel
Naudé.[106] In the course of his essay Naudé lets it be seen how thoroughly
he dislikes the character of the man about whom he writes. No evil
disposition attributed to Cardan by himself or by his enemies is left
unnoticed, and a lengthy catalogue of his offences is set down, but this list
does not contain the particular sin of broken faith in the matter of Tartaglia's
rules. On the contrary, after abusing and ridiculing a large portion of his
work, Naudé breaks out into almost rhapsodical eulogy about Cardan's
contributions to Mathematical science. "Quis negabit librum de
Proportionibus dignum esse, qui cum pulcherrimis antiquorum inventis
conferatur? Quis in Arithmetica non stupet, eum tot difficultates superasse,
quibus explicandis Villafrancus, Lucas de Burgo, Stifelius, Tartalea, vix ac
ne vix quidem pares esse potuissent?" It seems hard to believe, after reading
elsewhere the bitter assaults of Naudé,[107] that he would have neglected so
tempting an opportunity of darkening the shadows, if he himself had felt the
slightest offence, or if public opinion in the learned world was in any
perceptible degree scandalized by the disclosure made by the publication of
the Book of the Great Art.

This book was published at Nuremberg in 1545, and in its preface and
dedication Cardan fully acknowledges his obligations to Tartaglia and
Ferrari, with respect to the rules lately discussed, and gives a catalogue of
the former students of the Art, and attributes to each his particular
contribution to the mass of knowledge which he here presents to the world.
Leonardo da Pisa,[108] Fra Luca da Borgo, and Scipio Ferreo all receive due
credit for their work, and then Cardan goes on to speak of "my friend
Niccolo Tartaglia of Brescia, who, in his contest with Antonio Maria Fiore,
the pupil of Ferreo, elaborated this rule to assure him of victory, a rule
which he made known to me in answer to my many prayers." He goes on to
acknowledge other obligations to Tartaglia:[109] how the Brescian had first
taught him that algebraical discovery could be most effectively advanced by
geometrical demonstration, and how he himself had followed this counsel,
and had been careful to give the demonstration aforesaid for every rule he
laid down.
The Book of the Great Art was not published till six years after Cardan had
become the sharer of Tartaglia's secret, which had thus had ample time to
germinate and bear fruit in the fertile brain upon which it was cast. It is
almost certain that the treatise as a whole—leaving out of account the
special question of the solution of cubic equations—must have gained
enormously in completeness and lucidity from the fresh knowledge
revealed to the writer thereof by Tartaglia's reluctant disclosure, and, over
and beyond this, it must be borne in mind that Cardan had been working for
several years at Giovanni Colla's questions in conjunction with Ferrari, an
algebraist as famous as Tartaglia or himself. The opening chapters of the
book show that Cardan was well acquainted with the chief properties of the
roots of equations of all sorts. He lays it down that all square numbers have
two different kinds of root, one positive and one negative,[110] vera and
ficta: thus the root of 9 is either 3. or -3. He shows that when a case has all
its roots, or when none are impossible, the number of its positive roots is
the same as the number of changes in the signs of the terms when they are
all brought to one side. In the case of x3 + 3bx = 2c, he demonstrates his
first resolution of a cubic equation, and gives his own version of his
dealings with Tartaglia. His chief obligation to the Brescian was the
information how to solve the three cases which follow, i.e. x3 + bx = c. x3 =
bx + c. and x3 + c = bx, and this he freely acknowledges, and furthermore

admits the great service of the system of geometrical demonstration which
Tartaglia had first suggested to him, and which he always employed
hereafter. He claims originality for all processes in the book not ascribed to
others, asserting that all the demonstrations of existing rules were his own
except three which had been left by Mahommed ben Musa, and two
invented by Ludovico Ferrari.
With this vantage ground beneath his feet Cardan raised the study of
Algebra to a point it had never reached before, and climbed himself to a
height of fame to which Medicine had not yet brought him. His name as a
mathematician was known throughout Europe, and the success of his book
was remarkable. In the De Libris Propriis there is a passage which indicates
that he himself was not unconscious of the renown he had won, or disposed
to underrate the value of his contribution to mathematical science. "And
even if I were to claim this art (Algebra) as my own invention, I should
perhaps be speaking only the truth, though Nicomachus, Ptolemæus,
Paciolus, Boetius, have written much thereon. For men like these never
came near to discover one-hundredth part of the things discovered by me.
But with regard to this matter—as with divers others—I leave judgment to
be given by those who shall come after me. Nevertheless I am constrained
to call this work of mine a perfect one, seeing that it well-nigh transcends
the bounds of human perception."[111]

FOOTNOTES:
[84] It was published at Milan by Bernardo Caluschio, with a dedication—dated
1537—to Francesco Gaddi, a descendant of the famous family of Florence. This
man was Prior of the Augustinian Canons in Milan, and a great personage, but ill
fortune seems to have overtaken him in his latter days. Cardan writes (Opera,
tom. i. p. 107):—"qui cum mihi amicus esset dum floreret, Rexque cognomine
ob potentiam appellaretur, conjectus in carcerem, miseré vitam ibi, ne dicam
crudeliter, finivit: nam per quindecim dies in profundissima gorgyne fuit, ut
vivus sepeliretur."
[85] There is a reference to Osiander in De Subtilitate, p. 523. Cardan gives a
full account of his relations with Osiander and Petreius in Opera, tom. i. p. 67.
[86] November 1536.
[87] Ferrari was one of Cardan's most distinguished pupils. "Ludovicus Ferrarius
Bononiensis qui Mathematicas et Mediolani et in patria sua professus est, et

singularis in illis eruditionis."—De Vita Propria, ch. xxxv. p. 111. There is a
short memoir of Ferrari in Opera, tom. ix.
[88] Opera, tom. i. p. 66.
[89] Fra Luca's book, Summa de Arithmetica Geometria Proportioni é
Proportionalita, extends as far as the solution of quadratic equations, of which
only the positive roots were used. At this time letters were rarely used to express
known quantities.
[90] The early writers on Algebra used numerus for the absolute or known term,
res or cosa for the first power, quadratum for the second, and cubus for the third.
The signs + and - first appear in the work of Stifelius, a German writer, who
published a book of Arithmetic in 1544. Robert Recorde in his Whetstone of Wit
seems first to have used the sign of equality =. Vieta in France first applied
letters as general symbols of quantity, though the earlier algebraists used them
occasionally, chiefly as abbreviations. Aristotle also used them in the Physics.—
Libri. Hist. des Sciences Mathématiques. i. 104.
[91] Opera, tom. iv. p. 222.
[92] In the conclusion of the Treatise on Arithmetic, Cardan points out certain
errors in the work of Fra Luca. Fra Luca was a pupil of Piero della Francesca,
who was highly skilled in Geometry, and who, according to Vasari, first applied
perspective to the drawing of the human form.
[93] Tartaglia, i.e. the stutterer.
[94] Papadopoli, Hist. Gymn. Pata. (Ven. 1724).
[95] "Balbisonem post relatam jurisprudentiæ lauream redeuntem Brixiam
Nicolaus secutus est, cæpitque ex Mathematicis gloriam sibi ac divitias parare,
æque paupertatis impatiens, ac fortunæ melioris cupidus, quam dum Brixiæ
tuetur, homo morosæ, et inurbanæ rusticitatis prope omnium civium odia sibi
conciliavit. Quamobrem alibi vivere coactus, varias Italiæ urbes incoluit, ac
Ferrariæ, Parmæ, Mediolani, Romæ, Genuæ, arithmeticam, geometricam,
ceteraque quæ ad Mathesim pertinent, docuit; depugnavitque scriptis accerrimis
cum Cardano ac sibi ex illis quæsivit nomen et gloriam. Tandem domicilium
posuit Venetiis, ubi non a Senatoribus modo, ut mos Venetus habet eruditorum
hominum studiosissimus, maximi habitus est, at etiam a variis Magnatum ac
Principum legatis præmiis ac muneribus auctus sortem, quam tamdiu expetierat
visus sibi est conciliasse. Ergo ratus se majorem, quam ut a civibus suis
contemneretur, Brixiam rediit, ubi spe privati stipendii Euclidis elementa
explanare cœpit; sed quæ illum olim a civitate sua austeritas, rustica, acerba,
morosa, depulerat, eadem illum in eum apud omnes contemptum, et odium
iterum dejicit, ut exinde horrendus ac detestabilis omnibus fugere, atque iterum
Venetias confugere compulsus fuerit. Ibi persenex decessit."—Papadopoli, Hist.
Gymn. Pata., ii. p. 210.
[96] This work is the chief authority for the facts which follow. The edition
referred to is that of Venice, 1546. There is also a full account of the same in
Cossali, Origine dell' Algebra (Parma, 1799). vol. ii. p. 96.
[97] Quesiti et Inventioni, p. 115.

[98] Cardan writes: "Vi supplico per l'amor che mi portati, et per l'amicitia ch'è
tra noi, che spero durara fin che viveremo, che mi mandati sciolta questa
questione. 1 cubo piu 3. cose egual à 10." Cardan had mistaken (1/3 b)3 for 1/3
b3, or the cube of 1/3 of the co-efficient for 1/3 of the cube of the co-efficient.—
Quesiti et Inventioni p. 124.
[99] Quesiti et Inventioni, p. 125.
[100] "Non ha datta fora tal opera come cose composto da sua testa ma come
cose ellette raccolte e copiate de diverse libri a penna."—Quesiti et Inventioni, p.
127.
[101] Cardan repeats the remark in the first chapter of the Liber Artis Magnæ
(Opera, tom. iv. p. 222). "Deceptus enim ego verbis Lucæ Paccioli, qui ultra sua
capitula, generale ullum aliud esse posse negat (quanquam tot jam antea rebus a
me inventis, sub manibus esset) desperabam tamen invenire, quod quærere non
audebam." Perhaps he wrote them down as an apology or a defence against the
storm which he anticipated as soon as Tartaglia should have seen the new
Algebra.
[102] Subsequently Tartaglia wrote very bitterly against Cardan, as the latter
mentions in De Libris Propriis. "Nam etsi Nicolaus Tartalea libris materna
lingua editis nos calumniatur, impudentiæ tamen ac stultitiæ suæ non aliud
testimonium quæras, quam ipsos illius libros, in quibus nominatim
splendidiorem unumquemque e civibus suis proscindit: adeò ut nemo dubitet
insanisse hominem aliquo infortunio."—Opera, tom. i. p. 80.
[103] Quesiti et Inventioni, p. 129.
[104] Montucla, Histoire de Math. i. 596, gives a full account of Ferrari's
process.
[105] In the De Vita Propria, Cardan dismisses the matter briefly: "Ex hoc ad
artem magnam, quam collegi, dum Jo. Colla certaret nobiscum, et Tartalea, à
quo primum acceperam capitulum, qui maluit æmulum habere, et superiorem,
quam amicum et beneficio devinctum, cum alterius fuisset inventum."—ch. xlv.
p. 175.
[106] Prefixed to the De Vita Propria.
[107] In a question of broken faith, Cardan laid himself open especially to attack
by reason of his constant self-glorification in the matter of veracity.
[108] Leonardo knew that quadratic equations might have two positive roots,
and Cardan pursued this farther by the discovery that they might also have
negative roots.
[109] "Caput xxviii. De capitulo generali cubi et rerum æqualium numero,
Magistri Nicolai Tartagliæ, Brixiensis—Hoc capitulum habui à prefato viro ante
considerationem demonstrationum secundi libri super Euclidem, et æquatio hæc
cadit in . cu v binomii ex genere binomii secundi et qunti m̃ . . cuba
universali recisi ejusdem binomii."—Opera, tom. iv. p. 341.

[110] Montucla, who as a historian of Mathematics has a strong bias against
Cardan, gives him credit for the discovery of the fictæ radices, but on the other
hand he attributes to Vieta Cardan's discovery of the method of changing a
complete cubic equation into one wanting the second term.—Ed. 1729, p. 595.
[111] Opera, tom. i. p. 66.

CHAPTER VI
It has been noted that Cardan quitted Pavia at the end of 1544 on account of
the bankruptcy of the University, and that in 1546 a generous offer was
made to him on condition of his entering the service of Pope Paul III.; an
offer which after some hesitation he determined to refuse. In the autumn of
this same year he resumed his teaching at Pavia, a fact which sanctions the
assumption that this luckless seat of learning must have been once more in
funds. In the year following, in 1547, there came to him another offer of
employment accompanied by terms still more munificent than the Pope's,
conveyed through Vesalius[112] and the ambassador of the King of
Denmark. "The emolument was to be a salary of three hundred gold crowns
per annum of the Hungarian currency, and in addition to these six hundred
more to be paid out of the tax on skins of price. This last-named money
differed in value by about an eighth from the royal coinage, and would be
somewhat slower in coming in. Also the security for its payment was not so
solid, and would in a measure be subject to risk. To this was farther added
maintenance for myself and five servants and three horses. This offer I did
not accept because the country was very cold and damp, and the people
well-nigh barbarians; moreover the rites and doctrines of religion were
quite foreign to those of the Roman Church."[113]
Cardan was now forty-six years of age, a mathematician of European fame,
and the holder of an honourable post at an ancient university, which he
might have exchanged for other employment quite as dignified and far more
lucrative. In dealing with a character as bizarre as his, it would be as a rule
unprofitable to search deeply for motives of action, but in this instance it is
no difficult matter to detect upon the surface several causes which may have
swayed him in this decision to remain at Pavia. However firmly he may
have set himself to win fame as a physician, he was in no way disposed to
put aside those mathematical studies in which he had already made so
distinguished a name, nor to abandon his astrology and chiromancy and
discursive reading of all kinds. At Pavia he would find leisure for all these,
and would in addition be able to make good any arrears of medical and

magical knowledge into which he might have fallen during the years so
largely devoted to the production of the Book of the Great Art. Moreover,
the time in question was one of the prime epochs in the history of the
healing art. A new light had just arisen in Vesalius, who had recently
published his book, Corporis Humani Fabrica, and was lecturing in divers
universities on the new method of Anatomy, the actual dissection of the
human body. He went to Pavia in the course of his travels and left traces of
his visit in the form of a revived and re-organized school of Anatomy. This
fact alone would have been a powerful attraction to Cardan, ever greedy as
he was of new knowledge, but there was another reason which probably
swayed him more strongly still, to wit, the care of his eldest son's education
and training. Gian Battista Cardano was now in his fourteenth year, and,
according to the usages of the time, old enough to make a beginning of his
training in Medicine, the profession he was destined to follow. It is not
recorded whether or not he chose this calling for himself; but, taking into
account the deep and tender affection Jerome always manifested towards
his eldest son, it is not likely that undue compulsion was used in the matter.
The youth, according to his father's description, strongly favoured in person
his grandfather Fazio.[114] He had come into the world at a time when his
parents' fortunes were at their lowest ebb, during those terrible months
spent at Gallarate,[115] and in his adolescence he bore divers physical
evidences of the ill nurture—it would be unjust to call it neglect—which he
had received. At one time he was indeed put in charge of a good nurse, but
he had to be withdrawn from her care almost immediately through her
husband's jealousy, and he was next sent to a slattern, who fed him with old
milk, and not enough of that; or more often with chewed bread. His body
was swollen and unhealthy, he suffered greatly from an attack of fever,
which ultimately left him deaf in one ear. He gave early evidence of a fine
taste in music, an inheritance from his father, and was, according to
Cardan's showing, upright and honest in his carriage, gifted with talents
which must, under happier circumstances, have placed him in the first rank
of men of learning, and in every respect a youth of the fairest promise. The
father records that he himself, though well furnished by experience in the
art of medicine, was now and again worsted by his son in disputation, and
alludes in words of pathetic regret to divers problems, too deep for his own
powers of solution, which Gian Battista would assuredly have mastered in
the course of time. He does not forget to notice certain of the young man's

failings; for he remarks that he was temperate of speech, except when he
was angered, and then he would pour forth such a torrent of words that he
scarce seemed in his right mind. Cardan professes to have discerned a cause
for these failings, and the calamities flowing therefrom, in the fact that Gian
Battista had the third and fourth toes of his right foot united by a
membrane; he declares that, if he had known of this in time, he would have
counteracted the evil by dividing the toes.[116] Gian Battista eventually
gained the baccalaureat in his twenty-second year, and two years after
became a member of the College.
The life which Cardan planned to lead at Pavia was unquestionably a full
one. He had several young men under his care as pupils besides his son,
amongst them being a kinsman of his, Gasparo Cardano, a youth of sterling
virtue and a useful coadjutor in times to come. He was at this time engaged
on his most important works in Medicine and Physical Science. He worked
hard at his profession, practising occasionally and reading voraciously all
books bearing on his studies. He wrote and published several small works
during the four years—from 1547 to 1551—of his Professorship at Pavia;
the most noteworthy of which were the Book of Precepts for the guidance
of his children, and some Treatises on the Preservation of Health. He also
wrote a book on Physiognomy, or as he called it Metoposcopy, an abstract
of which appears as a chapter in De Utilitate (lib. iii. c. 10), but the major
part of his time must have been consumed in collecting and reducing to
form the huge mass of facts out of which his two great works, De Subtilitate
and De Varietate Rerum, were built up.
A mere abstract of the contents of these wonderful books would fill many
pages, and prove as uninteresting and unsuggestive as abstracts must always
be; and a commentary upon the same, honestly executed, would make a
heavy draft on the working life-time of an industrious student. In reference
to each book the author has left a statement of the reasons which impelled
him to undertake his task, the most cogent of which were certain dreams.
[117]
Soon after he had begun to write the De Astrorum Judiciis he dreamt
one night that his soul, freed from his body, was ranging the vault of heaven
near to the moon, and the soul of his father was there likewise. But he could
not see this spirit, which spake to him saying, "Behold, I am given to you as
a comrade." The spirit of the father then went on to tell the son how, after
various stages of probation, he would attain the highest heaven, and in the

terms of this discourse Cardan professed to discern the scheme of his more
important works.
The De Subtilitate represents Cardan's original conception of a treatise
dealing with the Cosmos, but during the course of its preparation a vast
mass of subsidiary and contingent knowledge accumulated in his note-
books, and rendered necessary the publication of a supplementary work, the
De Varietate,[118] which, by the time it was finished, had grown to a bulk
exceeding that of the original treatise. The seminal ideas which germinated
and produced such a vast harvest of printed words, were substantially the
same which had possessed the brains of Paracelsus and Agrippa. Cardan
postulates in the beginning a certain sympathy between the celestial bodies
and our own, not merely general, but distributive, the sun being in harmony
with the heart, and the moon with the animal humours. He considers that all
organized bodies are animated, so that what we call the Spirit of Nature is
present everywhere. Beyond this everything is ruled by the properties of
numbers.[119] Heat and moisture are the only real qualities in Nature, the
first being the formal, and the second the material, cause of all things; these
conceptions he gleaned probably from some criticisms of Aristotle on the
archaic doctrines of Heraclitus and Thales as to the origin of the universe.
It is no marvel that a writer, gifted with so bizarre and imaginative a temper,
so restless and greedy of knowledge, sitting down to work with such a
projection before him, should have produced the richest, and at the same
time the most chaotic, collection of the facts of Natural Philosophy that had
yet issued from the press. The erudition and the industry displayed in the
gathering together of these vast masses of information, and in their
verification by experiment, are indeed amazing; and, in turning over his
pages, it is impossible to stifle regret that Cardan's confused method and
incoherent system should have rendered his work comparatively useless for
the spread of true knowledge, and qualified it only for a place among the
labores ineptiarum.
Cardan begins with a definition of Subtilty. "By subtilty I mean a certain
faculty of the mind by which certain phenomena, discernible by the senses
and comprehensible by the intellect, may be understood, albeit with
difficulty." Subtilty, as he understood it, possesses a threefold character:
substance, accident, and manifestation. With regard to the senses he admits

but four to the first rank: touch, sight, smell, and hearing; the claims of
taste, he affirms, are open to contention. He then passes on to discuss the
properties of matter: fire, moisture, cold, dryness, and vacuum. The last-
named furnishes him with a text for a discourse on a wonderful lamp which
he invented by thinking out the principle of the vacuum. This digression on
the very threshold of the work is a sample of what the reader may expect to
encounter all through the twenty-one books of the De Subtilitate and the
seventeen of the De Varietate. Regardless of the claims of continuity, he
jumps from principle to practice without the slightest warning. Intermingled
with dissertations on abstract causes and the hidden forces of Nature are to
be found descriptions of taps and pumps and syphons, and of the water-
screw of Archimedes, the re-invention of which caused poor Galeazzo
Rosso, Fazio's blacksmith friend, to go mad for joy. There are diagrams of
furnaces, of machinery for raising sunken ships, and of the common
steelyard. Cardan finds no problem of the universe too recondite to essay,
and in like manner he sets down information as to the most trivial details of
every-day economy: how to kill mice, why dogs bay the moon, how to
make vinegar, why a donkey is stupid, why flint and steel produce fire, how
to make the hands white, how to tell good mushrooms from bad, and how to
mark household linen. He treats of the elements, Earth, Air, and Water,
excluding Fire, because it produces nothing material; of the heavens and
light: metals, stones, plants, and animals. Marvellous stories abound, and
the most whimsical theories are advanced to account for the working of
Nature. He tells how he once saw a man from Porto Maurizio, pallid, with
little hair on his face, and fat in person, who had in his breasts milk enough
to suckle a child. He was a soldier, and this strange property caused him no
slight inconvenience. Sages, he affirms, on account of their studious lives,
are little prone to sexual passion. With them the vital power is carried from
the heart to a region remote from the genitals, i.e. to the brain, and for this
reason such men as a rule beget children weak and unlike themselves. Diet
has a valid effect on character, as the Germans, who subsist chiefly on the
milk of wild cows, are fierce and bold and brutal. Again, the Corsicans, who
eat young dogs, wild as well as domestic, are notably fierce, cruel,
treacherous, fearless, nimble, and strong, following thus the nature of dogs.
He argues at length to show that man is neither an animal nor a plant, but
something between the two. A man is no more an animal than an animal is a
plant. The animal has the anima sensitiva which the plant lacks, and man

transcends the animal through the gift of the anima intellectiva, which, as
Aristotle testifies, differs from the sensitiva. Some maintain that man and
the animals must be alike in nature and spirit, because it is possible for man
to catch certain diseases from animals. But animals take certain properties
from plants, and no one thinks of calling an animal a plant. Man's nature is
threefold: the Divine, which neither deceives nor is deceived; the Human,
which deceives, but is not deceived; the Brutish, which does not deceive,
but is deceived. Dissertations on the various sciences, the senses, the soul
and intellect, things marvellous, demons and angels, occupy the rest of the
chapters of the De Subtilitate.
At the end of the last book of De Varietate, Cardan gives a table showing
the books of the two works arranged in parallel columns so as to exhibit the
relation they bear to each other. A comparison of the treatment accorded to
any particular branch of Natural Philosophy in the De Subtilitate with that
given in the De Varietate, will show that in the last-named work Cardan
used his most discursive and anecdotic method. Mechanics are chiefly dealt
with in the De Subtilitate, and all through this treatise he set himself to
observe in a certain degree the laws of proportion, and kept more or less to
the point with which he was dealing, a system of treatment which left him
with a vast heap of materials on his hands, even after he had built up the
heavy tome of the De Subtilitate. Perhaps when he began his work upon the
fresh volume he found this ingens acervus too intractable and
heterogeneous to be susceptible of symmetrical arrangement, and was
forced to let it remain in confusion. Few men would sit down with a light
heart to frame a well-ordered treatise out of the débris of a heap of note-
books, and it would be unjust to censure Cardan's literary performance
because he failed in this task. Probably no other man living in his day
would have achieved a better result. It is certain that he expended a vast
amount of labour in attempting to reduce his collected mass of facts even to
the imperfect form it wears in the De Varietate Rerum.[120]
Considering that this book covers to a great extent the same ground as its
predecessor, Cardan must be credited with considerable ingenuity of
treatment in presenting his supplementary work without an undue amount
of repetition. In the De Varietate he always contrives to bring forward some
fresh fact or fancy to illustrate whatever section of the universe he may
have under treatment, even though this section may have been already dealt

with in the De Subtilitate. The characteristic most strongly marked in the
later book is the increased eagerness with which he plunges into the
investigation of certain forces, which he professes to appreciate as lying
beyond Nature, and incapable of scientific verification in the modern sense,
and the fabled manifestations of the same. He loses no opportunity of trying
to peer behind the curtain, and of seeking—honestly enough—to formulate
those various pseudo-sciences, politely called occult, which have now fallen
into ridicule and disrepute with all except the charlatan and the dupe, who
are always with us. Where he occupies in the De Subtilitate one page in
considering those things which lie outside Nature—demons, ghosts,
incantations, succubi, incubi, divinations, and such like—he spends ten in
the De Varietate over kindred subjects. There is a wonderful story[121] told
by his father of a ghost or demon which he saw in his youth while he was a
scholar in the house of Giovanni Resta at Pavia. He searches the pages of
Hector Boethius, Nicolaus Donis, Rugerus, Petrus Toletus, Leo Africanus,
and other chroniclers of the marvellous, for tales of witchcraft, prodigies,
and monstrous men and beasts, and devotes a whole chapter to chiromancy,
[122]
a subject with which he had occupied his plenteous leisure when he
was waiting for patients at Sacco. The diagram of the human hand given by
him does not differ greatly from that of the contemporary hand-books of the
"Art," and the leading lines are just the same. The heavenly bodies are as
potent here as in Horoscopy. The thumb is given to Mars, the index finger
to Jupiter, the middle finger to Saturn, the ring finger to the Sun, and the
little finger to Venus. Each finger-joint has its name, the lowest being called
the procondyle, the middle the condyle, and the upper the metacondyle. He
passes briefly over as lines of little import, the via combusta and the
Cingulus Orionis, but lays some stress on the character of the nails and the
knitting together of the hand, declaring that hands which can be bent easily
backward denote effeminacy or a rapacious spirit. He teaches that lines are
most abundant in the hands of children, on account of the tenderness of the
skin, and of old men on account of the dryness, a statement which might
suggest the theory that lines come into existence through the opening and
closing of the hand. But the adoption of this view would have proved more
disastrous to chiromancy than ridicule or serious criticism; so he
straightway finds an explanation for this fact in the postulate that lines in
young people's hands speak as to the future, and in old men's as to the past.
Later he goes on to affirm that lines in the hand cannot be treated as mere

wrinkles arising from the folding of the skin, unless we are prepared to
admit that wrinkled people are more humorous than others, alluding no
doubt to the lines in the face caused by laughter, a proposition which does
not seem altogether convincing or consequential, unless we also postulate
that all humorous men laugh at every joke. There is a line in the hand which
he calls the linea jecoraria, and the triangle formed by this and the linea
vitæ and the linea cerebri, rules the disposition of the subject, due
consideration being given to the acuteness or obtuseness of the angles of
this triangle. Cardan seems to have based his treatise on one written by a
certain Ruffus Ephesius, and it is without doubt one of the dullest portions
of his work.[123]
It is almost certain that Cardan purposed to let the De Varietate come forth
from the press immediately after the De Subtilitate, but before the MS. was
ready, it came to pass that he was called to make that memorable journey to
Scotland in order to find a remedy for the ailment which was troubling the
Archbishop of St. Andrews, a journey which has given to Britons a special
interest in his life and work. In dealing with the Cosmos in the De
Subtilitate he had indeed made brief mention of Britain; but, writing then,
he had no personal relations with either England or Scotland, or the people
thereof; and, but for his subsequent visit, he would not have been able to set
down in the pages of his second book so many interesting and suggestive
notes of what he had seen and heard, and his ideas of the politics of the
time. Again, if he had not been urged by the desire all men feel to read what
others may have to say about places they have visited, it is not likely that he
would have searched the volumes of Hector Boethius and other early
writers for legends and stories of our island. Writing of Britain[124] in the
De Subtilitate he had praised its delicate wool and its freedom from
poisonous beasts: a land where the wolf had been exterminated, and where
the sheep might roam unvexed by any beast more formidable than the fox.
The inordinate breeding of rooks seems even in those days[125] to have led
to a war of extermination against them, carried on upon a system akin to
that which was waged against the sparrow in the memory of men yet living.
But besides this one, he records, in the De Subtilitate, few facts concerning
Britain. He quotes the instances of Duns Scotus and Suisset in support of
the view that the barbarians are equal to the Italians in intellect,[126] and he
likewise notices the use of a fertilizing earth—presumably marl—in

agriculture,[127] and the longevity of the people, some of whom have
reached their hundred and twentieth year.[128] The first notice of us in the
De Varietate is in praise of our forestry, forasmuch as he remarked that the
plane tree, which is almost unknown in Italy through neglect, thrives well in
Scotland, he himself having seen specimens over thirty feet high growing in
the garden of the Augustinian convent near Edinburgh. The lack of fruit in
England he attributes rather to the violence of the wind than to the cold; but,
in spite of our cruel skies, he was able to eat ripe plums in September, in a
district close to the Scottish border. He bewails the absence of olives and
nuts, and recommends the erection of garden-walls in order to help on the
cultivation of the more delicate fruits.
In a conversation with the Archbishop of St. Andrews he was told that the
King of Scots ruled over one hundred and sixty-one islands, that the people
of the Shetland Islands lived for the most part on fish prepared by freezing
or sun-drying or fire, and had no other wealth than the skins of beasts.
Cardan pictures the Shetlanders of that time as leading an ideal life,
unvexed by discord, war, or ambition, labouring in the summer for the
needs of winter, worshipping Christ, visited only once a year by a priest
from Orkney, who came over to baptize the children born within the last
twelve months, and was remunerated by a tenth of the catch of fish. He
speaks of the men of Orkney as a very lively, robust, and open-hearted
crew, furnished with heads strong enough to defy drunkenness, even after
swallowing draughts of the most potent wine. The land swarms with birds,
and the sheep bring forth two or even three lambs at a time. The horses are
a mean breed, and resemble asses both as to their size and their patience.
Some one told him of a fish, often seen round about the islands, as big or
even bigger than a horse, with a hide of marvellous toughness, and useful
for the abundance of oil yielded by its carcase. He attributes the bodily
strength of these northerners to the absence of four deleterious influences—
drunkenness, care, heat, and dry air. Cardan seems to have been astonished
at the wealth of precious stones he found in Scotland—dark blue stones,
diamonds, and carbuncles[129]—"maxime juxta academiam Glaguensis
oppidi in Gludisdalia regione," and he casts about to explain how it is that
England produces nothing of the kind, but only silver and lead. He solves
the question by laying down an axiom that the harder the environment, the

harder the stone produced. The mountains of Scotland are both higher and
presumably harder than those of England, hence the carbuncles.
He was evidently fascinated with the wealth of local legend and story which
haunted the misty regions he visited. In dealing with demons and familiar
spirits he cites the authority of Merlin, "whose fame is still great in
England," and tells a story of a young woman living in the country of Mar.
[130]
This damsel was of noble family and very fair in person, but she
displayed a great unwillingness to enter the marriage state. One day it was
discovered that she was pregnant, and when the parents went to make
inquisition for the seducer, the girl confessed that, both by day and night, a
young man of surpassing beauty used to come and lie with her. Who he was
and whence he came she knew not. They, though they gave little credit to
her words, were informed by her handmaid, some three days afterwards,
that the young man was once more with her; wherefore, having broken open
the door, they entered, bearing lights and torches, and beheld, lying in their
daughter's arms, a monster, fearsome and dreadful beyond human belief. All
the neighbours ran quickly to behold the grisly sight, and amongst them a
good priest, well acquainted with pagan rites. When he had come anear, and
had said some verses of the Gospel of Saint John, the fiend vanished with a
terrible noise, bearing away the roof of the chamber, and leaving the bed in
flames. In three days' time the girl gave birth to a monstrous child, more
hideous than anything heretofore seen in Scotland, wherefore the nurses, to
keep off disgrace from the family, caused it to be burnt on a pile of wood.
There is another story of a youth living about fourteen miles from
Aberdeen, who was visited every night by a demon lady of wonderful
loveliness, though he bolted and locked his chamber-door; but by fasting
and praying and keeping his thoughts fixed on holy things he rid himself at
last of the unclean spirit.[131] He quotes from Boethius the whole story of
Macbeth,[132] and tells how "Duffus rex" languished and wasted under the
malefic arts of certain witches who made an image of the king in wax and,
by using various incantations, let the same melt slowly away before the fire.
The unhappy king came near to die, but, as soon as these nefarious practices
were discovered, the image was destroyed, whereupon the king was
restored to health.[133]

When Cardan received the first letter from Scotland the manuscript of the
De Varietate must have been ready or nearly ready for the printer; but, for
some reason or other, he determined to postpone the publication of the work
until he should have finished with the Archbishop, and took his manuscript
with him when he set forth on his travels. In 1550 there came another break
in Cardan's life as Professor at Pavia, the reason being the usual one of
dearth of funds.[134] In 1551 he went back for a short time, but the storms of
war were rising on all sides, and the luckless city of Pavia was in the very
centre of the disturbance. The French once more crossed the Alps, pillaging
and devastating the country, their ostensible mission being the vindication
of the rights of Ottavio Farnese to the Duchy of Parma. Ottavio had
quarrelled with Pope Julius III., who called upon the Emperor for
assistance. War was declared, and Charles set to work to annex Parma and
Piacenza as well to the Milanese. Cardan withdrew to Milan at the end of
the year. Gian Battista had now completed his medical course, so there was
now no reason why he should continue to live permanently at Pavia.
Moreover at this juncture he seems to have been strongly moved to
augment the fame which he had already won in Mathematics and Medicine
by some great literary achievement, and he worked diligently with this
object in view.[135]
At the beginning of November 1551, a letter came to him from Cassanate,
[136]
a Franco-Spanish physician, who was at that time in attendance upon
the Archbishop of St. Andrews, requesting him to make the journey to Paris,
and there to meet the Archbishop, who was suffering from an affection of
the lungs. The fame of Cardan as a physician had spread as far as Scotland,
and the Archbishop had set his heart on consulting him. Cassanate's letter is
of prodigious length. After a diffuse exordium he proceeds to praise in
somewhat fulsome terms the De Libris Propriis and the treatises De
Sapientia[137] and De Consolatione, which had been given to him by a
friend when he was studying at Toulouse in 1549. He had just read the De
Subtilitate, and was inflamed with desire to become acquainted with
everything which Cardan had ever written. But what struck Cassanate more
than anything was a passage in the De Sapientia on a medical question,
which he extracts and incorporates in his epistle. Cardan writes there: "But
if my profession itself will not give me a living, nor open out an avenue to
some other career, I must needs set my brains to work, to find therein

something unknown hitherto, for the charm of novelty is unfailing,
something which would prove of the highest utility in a particular case. In
Milan, while I was fighting the battle against hostile prejudice, and was
unable to earn enough to pay my way (so much harder is the lot of manifest
than of hidden merit, and no man is honoured as a prophet in his own
country), I brought to light much fresh knowledge, and worked my hardest
at my art, for outside my art there was naught to be done. At last I
discovered a cure for phthisis, which is also known as Phthœ, a disease for
many centuries deemed incurable, and I healed many who are alive to this
day as easily as I have cured the Gallicus morbus. I also discovered a cure
for intercutaneous water in many who still survive. But in the matter of
invention, Reason will be the leader, but Experiment the Master, the
stimulating cause of work in others. If in any experiment there should seem
to be an element of danger, let it be performed gently, and little by little."
[138]
It is not wonderful that the Archbishop, who doubtless heard all about
Cardan's asserted cure of phthisis from Cassanate, should have been eager
to submit his asthma to Cardan's skill. After acknowledging the deep debt
of gratitude which he, in common with the whole human race, owed to
Cardan in respect to the two discoveries aforesaid, Cassanate comes to the
business in hand, to wit, the Archbishop's asthma. Not content with giving a
most minute description of the symptoms, he furnishes Cardan also with a
theory of the operations of the distemper. He writes: "The disease at first
took the form of a distillation from the brain into the lungs, accompanied
with hoarseness, which, with the help of the physician in attendance, was
cured for a time, but the temperature of the brain continued unfavourable,
being too cold and too moist, so that certain unhealthy humours were
collected in the head and there remained, because the brain could neither
assimilate its own nutriment, nor disperse the humours which arose from
below, being weakened through its nutriment of pituitous blood. After an
attack of this nature it always happened that, whenever the body was filled
with any particular matter, which, in the form of substance, or vapour, or
quality, might invade the brain, a fresh attack would certainly arise, in the
form of a fresh flow of the same humour down to the lungs. Moreover these
attacks were found to agree almost exactly with the conjunctions and
oppositions of the moon."[139]

Cassanate goes on to say that his patient had proved somewhat intractable,
refusing occasionally to have anything to do with his medical attendants,
and that real danger was impending owing to the flow of humour having
become chronic. Fortunately this humour was not acrid or salt; if it were,
phthisis must at once supervene. But the Archbishop's lungs were becoming
more and more clogged with phlegm, and a stronger effort of coughing was
necessary to clear them. Latterly much of the thick phlegm had adhered to
the lungs, and consequently the difficulty of breathing was great. Cassanate
declares that he had been able to do no more than to keep the Archbishop
alive, and he fears no one would be able to work a complete cure, seeing
that the air of Scotland is so moist and salt, and that the Archbishop is
almost worried to death by the affairs of State. He next urges Cardan to
consent to meet the Archbishop in Paris, a city in which learning of all sorts
flourishes exceedingly, the nurse of many great philosophers, and one in
which Cardan would assuredly meet the honour and reverence which is his
due. The Archbishop's offer was indeed magnificent in its terms. Funds
would be provided generous enough to allow the physician to travel post
the whole of the journey, and the goodwill of all the rulers of the states en
route would be enlisted in his favour. Cassanate finishes by fixing the end
of January 1552 as a convenient date for the rendezvous in Paris, and, as
time and place accorded with Cardan's wishes, he wrote to Cassanate
accepting the offer.
The Archbishop of St. Andrews was John Hamilton, the illegitimate brother
of James, Earl of Arran, who had been chosen Regent of the kingdom after
the death of James V. at Flodden, and the bar sinister, in this case as in
many others, was the ensign of a courage and talent and resource in which
the lawful offspring was conspicuously wanting. Any student taking a
cursory glance at the epoch of violence and complicated intrigue which
marked the infancy of Mary of Scotland, may well be astonished that a man
so weak and vain and incompetent as James Hamilton—albeit his footing
was made more secure by his position as the Queen's heir-presumptive—
should have held possession of his high dignities so long as he did.
Alternately the tool of France and of England, he would one day cause his
great rival Cardinal Beatoun to be proclaimed an enemy of his country, and
the next would meet him amicably and adopt his policy. After becoming the
partisan of Henry VIII. and the foe of Rome, he finally put the coping-stone

to his inconsistencies by becoming a convert to Catholicism in 1543. But in
spite of his indolence and weakness, he was still Regent of Scotland, when
his brother, the Archbishop, was seized with that attack of periodic asthma
which threatened to change vitally the course of Scottish politics. A very
slight study of contemporary records will show that Arran had been largely,
if not entirely, indebted to the distinguished talents and to the ambition of
his brother for his continued tenure of the chief power of the State. If
confirmation of this view be needed, it will be found in the fact that, as soon
as the Archbishop was confined to a sick-room, Mary of Guise, the Queen
Mother, supported by her brothers in France and by the Catholic party at
home, began to undermine the Regent's position by intrigue, and ultimately,
partly by coaxing, partly by threats, won from him a promise to surrender
his power into her hands.
In the meantime Cardan was waiting for further intelligence and directions
as to his journey. The end of January had been fixed as the date of the
meeting at Paris, and it was not until the middle of February that any further
tidings came to him. Then he received a letter from Cassanate and a
remittance to cover the expenses of his journey.[140] He set out at once on
February 22, undaunted by the prospect of a winter crossing of the Simplon,
and, having travelled by way of Sion and Geneva, arrived at Lyons on
March 13. In Cassanate's first letter Paris had been named as the place of
meeting; but, as a concession to Cardan's convenience, Lyons was added as
an alternative, in case he should find it impossible to spare time for a longer
journey. Cardan accordingly halted at Lyons, but neither Archbishop nor
physician was there to meet him. After he had waited for more than a
month, Cassanate appeared alone, and brought with him a heavy purse of
money for the cost of the long journey to Scotland, which he now begged
Cardan to undertake, and a letter from the Archbishop himself, who wrote
word that, though he had fully determined in the first instance to repair to
Paris, or even to Lyons, to meet Cardan, he found himself at present
mastered by the turn of circumstances, and compelled to stay at home. He
promised Cardan a generous reward, and a reception of a nature to convince
him that the Scots are not such Scythians as they might perchance be
deemed in Milan.[141] Cardan's temper was evidently upset by this turn of
affairs, and his suspicions aroused; for he sets down his belief that patient
and physician had from the first worked with the intention of dragging him

all the way to Scotland, but that they had waited till he was across the Alps
before showing their hand, fearing lest if the word Scotland should have
been used at the outset, he would never have moved from Milan.[142] In
describing his journey he writes:—"I tarried in Lyons forty-six days, seeing
nothing of the Archbishop, nor of the physician whom I expected,
nevertheless I gained more than I spent. I met there Ludovico Birago, a
gentleman of Milan, and commander of the King's foot-soldiers, and with
him I contracted a close friendship, so much so that, had I been minded to
take service under Brissac, the King's lieutenant, I might have enjoyed a
salary of one thousand crowns a year. Shortly afterwards Guglielmo
Cassanate, the Archbishop's physician, arrived in Lyons and brought with
him three hundred other golden crowns, which he handed to me, in order
that I might make the journey with him to Scotland, offering in addition to
pay the cost of travel, and promising me divers gifts in addition. Thus,
making part of our journey down the Loire, I arrived at Paris. While I was
there I met Orontius; but he for some reason or other refused to visit me.
Under the escort of Magnienus[143] I inspected the treasury of the French
Kings, and the Church of Saint Denis. I saw likewise something there, not
so famous, but more interesting to my mind, and this was the horn of a
unicorn, whole and uninjured. After this we met the King's physicians, and
we all dined together, but I declined to hold forth to them during dinner,
because before we sat down they were urgent that I should begin a
discussion. I next set forth on my journey, my relations with Pharnelius and
Silvius, and another of the King's physicians,[144] whom I left behind, being
of a most friendly nature, and travelled to Boulogne in France, where, by
the command of the Governor of Sarepont, an escort of fourteen armed
horsemen and twenty foot-soldiers was assigned to me, and so to Calais. I
saw the tower of Cæsar still standing. Then having crossed the narrow sea I
went to London, and at last met the Archbishop at Edinburgh on the twenty-
ninth of June. I remained there till the thirteenth of September. I received as
a reward four hundred more gold crowns; a chain of gold worth a hundred
and twenty crowns, a noble horse, and many other gifts, in order that no one
of those who were with me should return empty-handed."[145]
The Archbishop's illness might in itself have supplied a reason for his
inability to travel abroad and meet Cardan as he had agreed to do; but the
real cause of his change of plan was doubtless the condition of public

affairs in Scotland at the beginning of 1552. In the interval of time between
Cassanate's first letter to Cardan and the end of 1551, the Regent had half
promised to surrender his office into the hands of the Guise party in
Scotland, wherefore it was no wonder that the Primate, recognizing how
grave was the danger which threatened the source of his power, should have
resolved that, sick or sound, his proper place was at the Scottish Court.

FOOTNOTES:
[112] Vesalius had certainly lectured on anatomy at Pavia, but it would appear
that Cardan did not know him personally, seeing that he writes in De Libris
Propriis (Opera, tom. i. p. 138): "Brasavolum ... nunquam vidi, ut neque
Vesalium quamquam intimum mihi amicum."
[113] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxii. p. 99.
[114] In describing Fazio, Jerome writes: "Erat Euclidis operum studiosus, et
humeris incurvis: et filius meus natu major ore, oculis, incessu, humeris, illi
simillimus."—De Vita Propria, ch. iii. p. 8. In the same chapter Fazio is
described as "Blæsus in loquendo; variorum studiorum amator: ruber, oculis
albis et quibus noctu videret."
[115] "At uxor mea imaginabatur assidue se videre calvariam patris, qui erat
absens dum utero gereret Jo: Baptistam."—Paralipomenon, lib. iii. c. 21.
[116] De Utilitate, p. 832.
[117] "Post ex geminatis somniis, scripsi libros de Subtilitate quos impressos
auxi et denuo superauctos tertio excudi curavi."—De Vita Propria, ch. xlv. p.
175.
[118] "Libros de Rerum varietate anno MDLVIII edidi: erant enim reliquiæ
librorum de subtilitate."—De Vita Propria, p. 176. "Reversus in patriam, perfeci
libros XVII de Rerum varietate quos jampridem inchoaveram."—Opera, tom. i.
p. 110. He had collected much material during his life at Gallarate.
[119] Aristotle, Metaphysics, book I. ch. v., contains an examination of the
Pythagorean doctrine which maintains Number to be the Substance of all things:
— áùαλλ' αυτὸ τὸ απειρον και αυτὸ τὸ ἑν ουσίαν ειναι τουτων ων
κατηγορου̃νταιto.
[120] "Sed nullus major labor quam libri de Rerum Varietate quem cum sæpius
mutassem, demum traductis quibuscunque insignioribus rebus in libros de
Subtilitate, ita illum exhausi, ut totus denuo conscribendus fuerit atque ex
integro restituendus."—Opera, tom. i. p. 74.
He seems to have utilized the services of Ludovico Ferrari in compiling this
work.—Opera, tom. i. p. 64.

[121] De Varietate, p. 661.
[122] Book XV. ch. lxxix.
[123] He gives one example of his skill as a palmist in the De Vita Propria:
"Memini me dum essem adolescens, persuasum fuisse cuidam Joanni Stephano
Biffo, quod essem Chiromanticus, et tamen nil minus: rogat ille, ut prædicam ei
aliquid de vita; dixi delusum esse a sociis, urget, veniam peto si quicquam
gravius prædixero: dixi periculum imminere brevi de suspendio, intra
hebdomadam capitur, admovetur tormentis: pertinaciter delictum negat,
nihilominus tandem post sex menses laqueo vitam finivit."—ch. xlii. p. 156.
[124] "Ergo nunc Britannia inclyta vellere est. Nec mirum cum nullū animal
venenatū mittat, imò nec infestum præter vulpem, olim et lupum: nunc vero
exterminatis etiam lupis, tutò pecus vagat. Rore cœli sitim sedant greges, ab
omni alio potu arcentur, quod aquæ ibi ovibus sint exitiales: quia tamen in
pabulo humido vermes multi abundant, cornicū adeo multitudo crevit, ut ob
frugum damna nuper publico consilio illas perdentibus proposita præmia sint:
ubi enim pabulum, ibi animalia sunt quæ eo vescuntur, atque immodicè tunc
multiplicantur cum ubique abundaverit. Caret tamen ut dixi, serpentibus, tribus
ex causis: nam pauci possunt generari ob frigus immensum."—De Subtilitate, p.
298.
[125] Æneas Sylvius in describing his visit to Britain a century earlier says that
rooks had been recently introduced, and that the trees on which they roosted and
built belonged to the King's Exchequer.
[126] "Ejusdem insulæ accola fuit Ioannes, ut dixi, Suisset [Richard
Swineshead] cognomēto Calculator; in cujus solius unius argumenti solutione,
quod contra experimentū est de actione mutua tota laboravit posteritas; quem
senem admodum, nec inventa sua dum legeret intelligentem, flevisse referunt.
Ex quo haud dubium esse reor, quod etiam in libro de animi immortalite scripsi,
barbaros ingenio nobis haud esse inferiores: quandoquidem sub Brumæ cælo
divisa toto orbe Britannia duos tam clari ingenii viros emiserit."—De Subtilitate,
p. 444.
[127] Ibid., p. 142.
[128] p. 369.
[129] The fame of Scots as judges of precious stones had spread to Italy before
Cardan's time. In the Novellino of Masuccio, which was first printed in 1476,
there is a passage in the tenth novel of the first part, in which a rogue passes as
"grandissimo cognoscitore" of gems because he had spent much time in
Scotland.
[130] De Varietate, p. 636.
[131] De Varietate, p. 637.
[132] Ibid., p. 637.
[133] Ibid., p. 565.

[134] "Peracto L anno quod stipendium non remuneraretur mansi Mediolani."—
De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. 15.
[135] About this time he wrote the Liber Decem Problematum, and the treatise
Delle Burle Calde, one of his few works written in Italian.—Opera, tom. i. p.
109.
[136] Cassanate's letter is given in full (Opera, tom. i. p. 89).
[137] The quotation from the De Sapientia differs somewhat from the original
passage which stands on p. 578 of the same volume.
[138] Opera, tom. i. p. 89.
[139] In a subsequent interview with Cardan, Cassanate modifies this statement.
—Opera, tom. ix. p. 124.
[140] "Accepique antequam discederem aureos coronatos Gallicos 500 et
M.C.C. in reditu."—De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. 16.
[141] "Difficillimis causis victus venire non potui." The Archbishop's letter is
given in Opera, tom. i. p. 137.
[142] Geniturarum Exempla, p. 469.
[143] He mentions this personage in De Varietate, p. 672: "Johannes Manienus
medicus, vir egregius et mathematicaram studiosus." He was physician to the
monks of Saint Denis.
[144] The reception given to Cardan in Paris was a very friendly one. Orontius
was a mechanician and mathematician; and jealousy of Cardan's great repute
may have kept him away from the dinner, but the physicians were most
hospitable. Pharnelius [Fernel] was Professor of Medicine at the University, and
physician to the Court. Sylvius was an old man of a jocular nature, but as an
anatomist bitterly opposed to the novel methods of Vesalius, who was one of
Cardan's heroes. With this possibility of quarrelling over the merits of Vesalius,
it speaks well for the temper of the doctors that they parted on good terms.
Ranconet, another Parisian who welcomed Cardan heartily, was one of the
Presidents of the Parliament of Paris. He seems to have been a man of worth and
distinguished attainments, and Cardan gives an interesting account of him in
Geniturarum Exempla, p. 423.
[145] De Vita Propria, ch. xxix. p. 75. Cardan refers more than once to the
generosity of the Archbishop. He computes (Opera, tom. i. p. 93) that his visit
must have cost Hamilton four talents of gold; that is to say, two thousand golden
crowns.

CHAPTER VII
Cardan, as he has himself related, arrived at Edinburgh on June 29, 1552.
The coming of such a man at such a time must have been an event of
extraordinary interest. In England the Italy of the Renaissance had been in a
measure realized by men of learning and intellect through the reports of the
numerous scholars—John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, Henry Parker, Lord
Morley, Howard Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wyat, may be taken as
examples—who had wandered thither and come back with a stock of
histories setting forth the beauty and charm, and also the terror and
wickedness, of that wonderful land. Some echoes of this legend had
doubtless drifted down to Scotland, and possibly still more may have been
wafted over from France. Ascham had taken up his parable in the
Schoolmaster, describing the devilish sins and corruptions of Italy, and now
the good people of Edinburgh were to be given the sight of a man coming
thence, one who was fabled to have gathered together more knowledge,
both of this world and of that other hidden one which was to them just as
real, than any mortal man alive. Under these circumstances it is not
surprising that Cardan should have been regarded rather as a magician than
as a doctor, and in the Scotichronicon[146] it is recorded that the Primate was
cured of a lingering asthma by the incantations of an astrologer named
Cardan, from Milan. Cardan in his narrative speaks of Edinburgh as the
place where he met his patient, and does not mention any other place of
sojourn, but the record just quoted goes on to say that he abode with the
Primate for eleven weeks at his country residence at Monimail, near Cupar,
Fife, where there is a well called to this day Cardan's Well.
Cardan, as it has been noticed already, refused to commit himself to any
opinion as to the character of the Archbishop's distemper over the dinner-
table where he and Cassanate had been entertained by the French King's
physicians. Cassanate had set forth his views in full as to the nature of the
asthma which had to be dealt with in his letter to Cardan, and it is highly
probable that he would again bring forward these views in the hearing of
the Paris doctors. It is certain that some of the French physicians had,
previous to this, prescribed a course of treatment for the Archbishop,

probably without seeing him, and that the course was being tried when
Cardan arrived in Edinburgh.[147] For the first six weeks of his stay he
watched the case, and let the treatment aforesaid go on—whether it differed
from that which Cassanate recommended or not there is no evidence to
show. But no good result came of it. The Archbishop wasted in body and
became fretful and disturbed in mind, and, at last, Cardan was obliged to let
his opinion of the case be known; and, as this was entirely hostile to the
treatment which was being pursued, the inevitable quarrel between the
doctors burst forth with great violence. The Archbishop was irate with his
ordinary medical attendant, probably the physician who was left in charge
during Cassanate's absence—and this man retaliated upon Cardan for
having thus stirred up strife. Cardan's position was certainly a very uneasy
one. The other physicians were full of jealousy and malice, and the
Archbishop began to accuse him of dilatory conduct of the case, redoubling
his complaints as soon as he found himself getting better under the altered
treatment. So weary did Cardan become of this bickering that he begged
leave to depart at once, but this proposition the Primate took in very ill part.
Cassanate in his first diagnosis had traced the Archbishop's illness to an
excess of coldness and humidity in the brain. Now Cardan, on the other
hand, maintained that the brain was too hot. He found Cassanate's treatment
too closely fettered by his theory as to the causes of periodic asthma, but he
did not venture to exhibit his own course of treatment till after he had
gained some knowledge of the Archbishop's temper and habits. He came to
the conclusion that his patient was overwrought with the cares of State, that
he ate too freely, that he did not sleep enough, and that he was of a temper
somewhat choleric. Cardan set forth this view of the case in a voluminous
document, founding the course of treatment he proposed to pursue upon the
aphorisms of Galen. He altogether rejected Cassanate's view as to the
retention of the noxious humours in the head. The Archbishop had the
ruddy complexion of a man in good health, a condition which could
scarcely co-exist with the loading of the brain with matter which would
certainly putrify if retained for any long time. Cardan maintained that the
serous humour descended into the lungs, not by the passages, but by
soaking through the membranes as through linen.[148] After describing the
origin and the mode of descent of this humour, he goes on to search for an
auxiliary cause of the mischief, and this he finds in the imperfect digestive

powers of the stomach and liver. If the cause lay entirely in the brain, how
was it that all the cerebral functions were not vitiated? In fine, the source of
the disease lay, not in the weakness of the brain, but in an access of heat,
caused possibly by exposure to the sun, by which the matter of the brain
had become so rarefied that it showed unhealthy activity in absorbing
moisture from the other parts. This heat, therefore, must be reduced.
To accomplish this end three lines of treatment must be followed. First, a
proper course of diet; second, drugs; and third, certain manual operations.
As to diet, the Archbishop was ordered to take nothing but light and cooling
food, two to four pints of asses' milk in the early morning, drawn from an
ass fed on cooling herbs, and to use all such foods as had a fattening
tendency; tortoise or turtle-soup,[149] distilled snails, barley-water and
chicken-broth, and divers other rich edibles. The purging of the brain was a
serious business; it was to be compassed by an application to the coronal
suture of an ointment made of Greek pitch, ship's tar, white mustard,
euphorbium, and honey of anathardus: the compound to be sharpened, if
necessary, by the addition of blister fly, or rendered less searching by
leaving out the euphorbium and mustard. Cardan adds, that, by the use of
this persuasive application, he had sometimes brought out two pints of
water in twenty-four hours. The use of the shower-bath and plentiful
rubbing with dry cloths was also recommended.
The purging of the body was largely a question of diet. To prevent
generation of moisture, perfumes were to be used; the patient was to sleep
on raw silk and not upon feathers, and to let an hour and a half come
between supper and bed-time. Sleep, after all, was the great thing to be
sought. The Archbishop was counselled to sleep from seven to ten hours,
and to subtract time from his studies and his business and add the same to
sleep.[150]
Cardan's treatment, which seems to have been suggested as much by the
man of common-sense as by the physician, soon began to tell favourably
upon the Archbishop. He remained for thirty-five days in charge of his
patient, during which time the distemper lost its virulence and the patient
gained flesh. In the meantime the fame of his skill had spread abroad, and
well-nigh the whole nobility of Scotland flocked to consult him,[151] and
they paid him so liberally that on one day he made nineteen golden crowns.

But when winter began to draw near, Cardan felt that it was time to move
southward. He feared the cold; he longed to get back to his sons, and he was
greatly troubled by the continued ill-behaviour of one of the servants he had
brought with him—"maledicus, invidus, avarissimus, Dei contemptor;" but
he found his patient very loth to let him depart. The Archbishop declared
that his illness was alleviated but not cured, and only gave way unwillingly
when Cardan brought forward arguments to show what dangers and
inconveniences he would incur through a longer stay. Cardan had originally
settled to return by way of Paris, but letters which he received from his
young kinsman, Gasparo Cardano, and from Ranconet, led him to change
his plans. The country was in a state of anarchy, the roads being infested
with thieves, and Gasparo himself had the bad fortune to be taken by a gang
of ruffians. In consequence of these things Cardan determined to return by
way of Flanders and the Empire.
It was not in reason that Cardan would quit Scotland and resign the care of
his patient without taking the stars into his counsel as to the future. He cast
the Archbishop's horoscope, and published it in the Geniturarum Exempla.
It was not a successful feat. In his forty-eighth year, i.e. in 1560, the
astrologer declared that Hamilton would be in danger of poison and of
suffering from an affection of the heart. But the time of the greatest peril
seemed to lie between July 30 and September 21, 1554. The stars gave no
warning of the tragic fate which befell Archbishop Hamilton in the not very
distant future. For the succeeding six years he governed the Church in
Scotland with prudence and leniency, but in 1558 he began a persecution of
the reformers which kindled a religious strife, highly embarrassing to the
Catholic party then holding the reins of power. His cruelties were borne in
mind by the reformers when they got the upper hand. In 1563 he was
imprisoned for saying mass. In 1568 Mary, after her escape from Loch
Leven, gave the chief direction of her affairs into the hands of the
Archbishop, who was the bitter foe of the Regent Murray. Murray having
defeated the Queen's forces at Langside, Hamilton took refuge in
Dumbarton Castle, which was surprised and captured in 1571, when the
Archbishop was taken to Stirling and hanged. In the words of the Diurnal of
Occurrants: "as the bell struck six hours at even, he was hangit at the
mercat cross of Stirling upon a jebat."[152] His enemies would not let him

rest even there, for the next day, fixed to the tree, were found the following
verses:

"Cresce diu, felix arbor, semperque vireto
Frondibus ut nobis talia poma feras."

To return to Cardan. Having at last won from his patient leave to depart, he
set forth laden with rich gifts. In Scotland, Cardan found the most generous
paymasters he had ever met. In recording the niggard treatment which he
subsequently experienced at the hands of Brissac, the French Viceroy, he
contrasts it with the liberal rewards granted to him in what must then have
been the poorest of the European kingdoms;[153] and in the Preface of the
De Astrorum Judiciis (Basel, 1554) he writes in sympathetic and grateful
terms of the kind usage he had met in the North.[154] It must have been a
severe disappointment to him that he was unable to revisit Paris on his way
home, for letters from his friend Ranconet told him that a great number of
illustrious men had proposed to repair to Paris for the sake of meeting him;
and many of the nobles of France were anxious to consult him
professionally, one of them offering a fee of a thousand gold crowns. But
Cardan was so terrified by the report given by Gasparo of the state of
France, that he made up his mind he would on no account touch its frontiers
on his homeward journey.
Before he quitted Scotland there had come to him letters from the English
Court entreating him to tarry there some days on his way home to Italy, and
give his opinion on the health of Edward VI., who was then slowly
recovering from an attack of smallpox and measles. The young King's
recovery was more apparent than real, for he was, in fact, slowly sinking
under the constitutional derangement which killed him a few months later.
Cardan could hardly refuse to comply with this request, nor is there any
evidence to show that he made this visit to London unwillingly. But he soon
found out that those about the Court were anxious to hear from him
something more than a statement of his opinion as to Edward's health. They
wanted, before all else, to learn what the stars had to say as to the probable
duration of the sovereign's life. During his stay in Scotland Cardan would
certainly have gained some intelligence of the existing state of affairs at the
English Court; how in the struggle for the custody of the regal power, the
Lord High Admiral and the Lord Protector, the King's uncles, had lost their
heads; and how the Duke of Northumberland, the son of Dudley, the

infamous minion of Henry VII. and the destroyer of the ill-fated Seymours,
had now gathered all the powers and dignities of the kingdom into his own
hands, and was waiting impatiently for the death of Edward, an event which
would enable him to control yet more completely the supreme power,
through the puppet queen whom he had ready at hand to place upon the
throne. An Italian of the sixteenth century, steeped in the traditions of the
bloody and insidious state-craft of Milan and the Lombard cities, Cardan
would naturally shrink from committing himself to any such perilous
utterance: all the more for the reason that he had already formed an estimate
of the English as a fierce and cruel people. With his character as a magician
to maintain he could scarcely keep entire silence, so he wrote down for the
satisfaction of his interrogators a horoscope: a mere perfunctory piece of
work, as we learn afterwards. He begins by reciting the extraordinary nature
of the King's birth, repeating the legend that his mother was delivered of
him by surgical aid, and only lived a few hours afterwards; and declares
that, in his opinion, it would have been better had this boy never been born
at all. "Nevertheless, seeing that he had come into this world and been duly
trained and educated, it would be well for mankind were he to live long, for
all the graces waited upon him. Boy as he was, he was skilled in divers
tongues, Latin, English, and French, and not unversed in Greek, Italian, and
Spanish; he had likewise knowledge of dialectics, natural philosophy, and
music. His culture is the reflection of our mortal nature; his gravity that of
kingly majesty, and his disposition is worthy of so illustrious a prince.
Speaking generally, it was indeed a strange experience to realize that this
boy of so great talent and promise was being educated in the knowledge of
the affairs of men. I have not set forth his accomplishments, tricked out
with rhetoric so as to exceed the truth; of which, in sooth, my relation falls
short." Cardan next draws a figure of Edward's horoscope, and devotes
several pages to the customary jargon of astrologers; and, under the heading
"De animi qualitatibus," says: "There was something portentous about this
boy. He had learnt, as I heard, seven languages, and certainly he knew
thoroughly his own, French, and Latin. He was skilled in Dialectic, and
eager to be instructed in all subjects. When I met him, he was in his
fifteenth year, and he asked me (speaking Latin no less perfectly and
fluently than myself), 'What is contained in those rare books of yours, De
rerum varietate?' for I had dedicated these manuscripts to his name.[155]
Whereupon I began by pointing out to him what I had written in the

opening chapter on the cause of the comets which others had sought so long
in vain. He was curious to hear more of this cause, so I went on to tell him
that it was the collected light of the wandering stars. 'Then,' said he, 'how is
it, since the stars are set going by various impulses, that this light is not
scattered, or carried along with the stars in their courses?' I replied: 'It does
indeed move with them, but at a speed vastly greater on account of the
difference of our point of view; as, for instance, when the prism is cast upon
the wall by the sun and the crystal, then the least motion of the crystal will
shift the position of the reflection to a great distance.' The King said: 'But
how can this be done when no subjectum is provided? for in the case you
quote the wall is the subjectum to the reflection.' I replied: 'It is a similar
effect to that which we observe in the Milky Way, and in the reflection of
light when many candles are lighted in a mass; these always produce a
certain clear and lucent medium. Itaque ex ungue leonem.'
"This youth was the great hope of good and learned men everywhere, by
reason of his frankness and the gentleness of his manners. He began to take
an interest in the Arts before he understood them, and to understand them
before he had full occasion to use them. The production of such a
personality was an effort of humanity; and, should he be snatched away
before his time, not only England, but all the world must mourn his loss.
"When he was required to show the gravity of a king, he would appear to be
an old man. He played upon the lyre; he took interest in public affairs; and
was of a kingly mind, following thus the example of his father, who, while
he was over-careful to do right, managed to exhibit himself to the world in
an evil light. But the son was free from any suspicion of such a charge, and
his intelligence was brought to maturity by the study of philosophy."
Cardan next makes an attempt to gauge the duration of the King's life, and
when it is considered that he was a skilled physician, and Edward a sickly
boy, fast sinking into a decline, it is to be feared that he let sincerity give
way to prudence when he proclaimed that, in his fifty-sixth year the King
would be troubled with divers illnesses. "Speaking generally of the whole
duration of his life he will be found to be steadfast, firm, severe, chaste,
intelligent, an observer of righteousness, patient under trouble, mindful both
of injuries and benefits, one demanding reverence and seeking his own. He
would lust as a man, but would suffer the curse of impotence. He would be

wise beyond measure, and thereby win the admiration of the world; very
prudent and high-minded; fortunate, and indeed a second Solomon."
Edward VI. died on July 6, 1553, about six months after Cardan had
returned to Milan; and, before the publication of the Geniturarum Exempla
in 1554, the author added to the King's horoscope a supplementary note,
explaining his conduct thereanent and shedding some light upon the
tortuous and sinister intrigues which at that time engaged the ingenuity of
the leaders about the English Court. Now that he was safe from the
consequences of giving offence, he wrote in terms much less guarded as to
the state of English affairs. It must be admitted that his calculations as to the
King's length of days, published after death, have no special value as
calculations; but his impressions of the probable drift of events in England
are interesting as the view of a foreigner upon English politics, and
moreover they exhibit in strong light the sinister designs of
Northumberland. Cardan records his belief that, in the fourth month of his
fifteenth year, the King had been in peril of his life from the plottings of
those immediately about him. On one occasion a particular disposition of
the sun and Mars denoted that he was in danger of plots woven by a wicked
minister, nay, there were threatenings even of poison.[156] He does not
shrink from affirming that this unfortunate boy met his death by the
treachery of those about him. As an apology for the horoscope he drew
when he was in England, he lays down the principle that it is inexpedient to
give opinions as to the duration of life in dealing with the horoscopes of
those in feeble health, unless you shall beforehand consult all the directions
and processes and ingresses of the ruling planets, "and if I had not made
this reservation in the prognostic I gave to the English courtiers, they might
justly have found fault with me."
He next remarks that he had spent much time in framing this horoscope—
albeit it was imperfect—according to his usual practice, and that if he had
gone on somewhat farther, and consulted the direction of the sun and moon,
the danger of death in which the King stood would straightway have
manifested itself. If he had still been distrustful as to the directions
aforesaid, and had gone on to observe the processes and ingresses, the
danger would have been made clear, but even then he would not have dared
to predict an early death to one in such high position: he feared the
treacheries and tumults and the transfer of power which must ensue, and

drew a picture of all the evils which might befall himself, evils which he
was in no mood to face. Where should he look for protection amongst a
strange people, who had little mercy upon one another and would have still
less for him, a foreigner, with their ruler a mere boy, who could protect
neither himself nor his guest? It might easily come about that his return to
Italy would be hindered; and, supposing the crisis to come to the most
favourable issue, what would he get in return for all this danger and
anxiety? He calls to mind the cases of two soothsayers who were foolish
enough to predict the deaths of princes, Ascletarion, and a certain priest,
who foretold the deaths of Domitian and Galeazzo Sforza; and describes
their fate, which was one he did not desire to call down upon himself.
Although his forecast as to Edward's future was incomplete and
unsatisfactory, he foresaw what was coming upon the kingdom from the
fact that all the powers thereof, the strong places, the treasury, the
legislature, and the fleet, were gathered into the hands of one man
(Northumberland). "And this man, forsooth, was one whose father[157] the
King's father had beheaded; one who had plunged into confusion all the
affairs of the realm; seeing that he had brought to the scaffold, one after the
other, the two maternal uncles of the King. Wherefore he was driven on
both by his evil disposition and by his dread of the future to conspire
against his sovereign's life. Now in such a season as this, when all men held
their tongues for fear (for he brought to trial whomsoever he would), when
he had gained over the greater part of the nobles to his side by dividing
amongst them the spoil of the Church; when he, the most bitter foe of the
King's title and dignity, had so contrived that his own will was supreme in
the business of the State, I became weary of the whole affair; and, being
filled with pity for the young King, proved to be a better prophet on the
score of my inborn common-sense, than through my skill in Astrology. I
took my departure straightway, conscious of some evil hovering anigh, and
full of tears."[158]
The above is Cardan's view of the machinations of the statesmen in high
places in the English Court during the last months of Edward's life. Judged
by the subsequent action of Northumberland it is in the main correct; and,
taking into consideration his associations and environment during his stay
in London, this view bears evident traces of independent judgment. Sir John
Cheke, the King's former preceptor, and afterwards Professor of Greek at

Cambridge, had received him with all the courtesy due to a fellow-scholar,
and probably introduced him at Court. Cheke was a Chamberlain of the
Exchequer, and just about this time was appointed Clerk to the Privy
Council, wherefore he must have been fully acquainted with the aims and
methods of the opposing factions about the Court. His fellow-clerk, Cecil,
was openly opposed to Northumberland's designs, and prudently advanced
a plea of ill health to excuse his absence from his duties: but Cheke at this
time was an avowed partisan of the Duke, and of the policy which
professed to secure the ascendency of the anti-Papal party. Cardan, living in
daily intercourse with Cheke, might reasonably have taken up the point of
view of his kind and genial friend; but no,—he evidently rated
Northumberland, from beginning to end, as a knave and a traitor, and a
murderer at least in will.
When he quitted England in the autumn of 1552 Cardan did not shake
himself entirely free from English associations. In an ill-starred moment he
determined to take back to Italy with him an English boy.[159] He was
windbound for several days at Dover, and the man with whom he lodged
seems to have offered to let him take his son, named William, aged twelve
years, back to Italy. Cardan was pleased with the boy's manner and
appearance, and at once consented; but the adventure proved a disastrous
one. The boy and his new protector could not exchange a word, and only
managed to make each other understand by signs, and that very imperfectly.
The boy was resolute to go on while Cardan wanted to be rid of him; but his
conscience would not allow him to send him home unless he should, of his
own free will, ask to be sent, and by way of giving William a distaste for
the life he had chosen, he records that he often beat him cruelly on the
slightest pretext. But the boy was not to be shaken off. He persisted in
following his venture to the end, and arrived in Cardan's train at Milan,
where he was allowed to go his own way. The only care for his training
Cardan took was to have him taught music. He chides the unhappy boy for
his indifference to learning and for his love of the company of other youths.
What with his literary work and the family troubles which so soon fell upon
him, Cardan's hands were certainly full; but, all allowance being made, it is
difficult to find a valid excuse for this neglect on his part. William grew up
to be a young man, and was finally apprenticed to a tailor at Pavia, but his
knavish master set him to work as a vinedresser, suspecting that Cardan

cared little what happened so long as the young man was kept out of his
sight. William seems to have been a merry, good-tempered fellow; but his
life was a short one, for he took fever, and died in his twenty-second year.
[160]

Besides chronicling this strange and somewhat pathetic incident, Cardan
sets down in the Dialogus de Morte his general impressions of the English
people. Alluding to the fear of death, he remarks that the English, so far as
he has observed, were scarcely at all affected by it, and he commends their
wisdom, seeing that death is the last ill we have to suffer, and is, moreover,
inevitable. "And if an Englishman views his own death with composure, he
is even less disturbed over that of a friend or kinsman: he will look forward
to re-union in a future state of immortality. People like these, who stand up
thus readily to face death and mourn not over their nearest ones, surely
deserve sympathy, and this boy (William) was sprung from the same race.
In stature the English resemble Italians, they are fairer in complexion, less
ruddy, and broad in the chest. There are some very tall men amongst them:
they are gentle in manner and friendly to travellers, but easily angered, and
in this case are much to be dreaded. They are brave in battle, but wanting in
caution; great eaters and drinkers, but in this respect the Germans exceed
them, and they are prone rather than prompt to lust. Some amongst them are
distinguished in talent, and of these Scotus and Suisset[161] may be given as
examples. They dress like Italians, and are always fain to declare that they
are more nearly allied to us than to any others, wherefore they try specially
to imitate us in habit and manners as closely as they can. They are
trustworthy, freehanded, and ambitious; but in speaking of bravery, nothing
can be more marvellous than the conduct of the Highland Scots, who are
wont to take with them, when they are led to execution, one playing upon
the pipes, who, as often as not, is condemned likewise, and thus he leads the
train dancing to death." Like as the English were to Italians in other
respects, Cardan was struck with the difference between the two nations as
soon as the islanders opened their mouths to speak. He could not understand
a single word, but stood amazed, deeming them to be Italians who had lost
their wits. "The tongue is curved upon the palate; they turn about their
words in the mouth, and make a hissing sound with their teeth." He then
goes on to say that all the time of his absence his mind was full of thoughts
of his own people in Italy, wherefore he sought leave to return at once.

FOOTNOTES:
[146] Scotichronicon, vol. i. p. 286 [ed. G. F. S. Gordon, Glasgow, 1867].
Naudé, in his Apologie pour les grands hommes soupçonnez de Magie, writes:
"Ceux qui recherchoiant les Mathématiques et les Sciences les moins communes
étoient soupçonnez d'être enchanteurs et Magiciens."—p. 15.
[147] "Curam agebat Medicus ex constituto Medicorum Lutetianorum."—De
Vita Propria, ch. xl. p. 137. Cardan makes no direct mention of any other
physician in Scotland besides Cassanate; but the Archbishop would certainly
have a body physician in attendance during Cassanate's absence.
[148] "Per totam tunicam sicut in linteis."—Opera, tom. ix. p. 128.
[149] "Accipe testudinem maximam et illam incoque in aqua, donec dissolvatur,
deinde abjectis corticibus accipiantur caro, et ossa et viscera omnia mundata."—
Opera, tom. ix. p. 140.
[150] Another piece of advice runs as follows: "De venere certe non est bona,
neque utilis, ubi tamen contingat necessitas, debet uti ea inter duos somnos,
scilicet post mediam noctem, et melius est exercere eam ter in sex diebus pro
exemplo ut singulis duobus diebus semel, quam bis in una die, etiam quod staret
per decem dies."—Opera, tom. ix. p. 135.
[151] "Interim autem concurrebant multi, imo pené tota nobilitas."—Opera, tom.
l. p. 93.
[152] Scotichronicon, vol. i. p. 234. Larrey in his History of England seems to
have given currency to the legend that Cardan foretold the Archbishop's death.
"S'il en faut croire ce que l'Histoire nous dit de ce fameux Astrologe, il donna
une terrible preuve de sa science à l'Archevêque qu'il avoit gueri, lorsque prenait
congé de lire, il lui tint ce discours: 'Qu'il avoit bien pu le guerir de sa maladie;
mais qu'il n'étoit pas en son pouvoir de changer sa destinée, ni d'empêcher qu'il
ne fût pendu.'"—Larrey, Hist. d'Angleterre, vol. ii. p. 711.
[153] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxii. p. 101.
[154] "Scoticū nomen antea horruerā, eorum exemplo qui prius cœperunt odisse
quam cognoscere. Nunc cum ipsa gens per se humanissima sit atque supra
existimationem civilis, tu tamen tantum illi addis ornamenti, ut longe nomine tuo
jam nobilior evadat."—De Astrorum Judiciis, p. 3.
[155] Cardan evidently carried the MS. with him, for he writes (Opera, tom. i. p.
72): "Hoc fuit quod Regi Angliæ Edoardo sexto admodum adolescenti dum
redirem a Scotia ostendi."
[156] "Cumque ibi esset nodus etiā venenum, quod utinā abfuerit."—
Geniturarum Exempla, p. 411.
[157] Edmund Dudley, the infamous minister of Henry VII.
[158] Geniturarum Exempla, p. 412.

[159] In the prologue to Dialogus de Morte, Opera, tom. i. p. 673, he gives a full
account of this transaction. Of the boy himself he writes: "hospes ostendit mihi
filium nomine Guglielmum, ætatis annorum duodecim, probum, scitulum, et
parentibus obsequentem. Avus paternus nomine Gregorius adhuc vivebat, et erat
Ligur: pater Laurentius, familia nobili Cataneorum."
[160] Opera, tom. i. p. 119. Cardan here calls him "Gulielmus Lataneus Anglus
adolescens mihi charissimus." In the De Morte, however, he speaks of him as
"ex familia Cataneorum" (see last page).
[161] Cardan writes (De Subtilitate, p. 444) that Suisset [Richard Swineshead],
who lived about 1350, was known as the Calculator; but Kästner [Gesch. der
Math. I. 50] maintains that the title Calculator should be applied to the book
rather than to the author, and hints that this misapprehension on Cardan's part
shows that he knew of Suisset only by hearsay. The title of the copy of Suisset in
the British Museum stands "Subtilissimi Doctoris Anglici Suiset. Calculationes
Liber," Padue [1485]. Brunet gives one, "Opus aureum calculationum," Pavia,
1498.

CHAPTER VIII
Cardan travelled southward by way of the Low Countries. He stayed some
days at Antwerp, and during his visit he was pressed urgently to remain in
the city and practise his art. A less pleasant experience was a fall into a
ditch when he was coming out of a goldsmith's shop. He was cut and
bruised about the left ear, but the damage was only skin-deep. He went on
by Brussels and Cologne to Basel, where he once more tarried several days.
He had a narrow escape here of falling into danger, for, had he not been
forewarned by Guglielmo Gratarolo, a friend, he would have taken up his
quarters in a house infected by the plague. He was received as a guest by
Carlo Affaidato, a learned astronomer and physicist, who, on the day of
departure, made him accept a valuable mule, worth a hundred crowns.
Another generous offer of a similar kind was made to him shortly
afterwards by a Genoese gentleman of the family of Ezzolino, who fell in
with him accidentally on the road. This was the gift of a very fine horse (of
the sort which the English call Obinum), but, greatly as Cardan desired to
have the horse, his sense of propriety kept him back from accepting this
gift.[162]
He went next to Besançon, where he was received by Franciscus
Bonvalutus, a scholar of some note, and then by Berne to Zurich. He must
have crossed the Alps by the Splugen Pass, as Chur is named in his
itinerary, and he also describes his voyage down the Lake of Como on the
way to Milan, where he arrived on January 3, 1553. Cardan was a famous
physician when he set out on his northward journey; but now on his return
he stood firmly placed by the events of the last few months at the head of
his profession. Writing of the material results of his mission to Scotland, he
declares that he is ashamed to set down the terms upon which he was paid,
so lavishly was he rewarded for his services. The offers made to him by so
many exalted personages to secure his permanent and exclusive attention
would indeed have turned the heads of most men. There was the offer from
the King of Denmark; another, in 1552, from the King of France at a salary
of thirteen hundred crowns a year; and yet another made by the agents of
Charles V., who was then engaged in his disastrous attack upon Metz. All of

them he refused: he had no inclination to share the perils of the leaguer of
Metz, and his sense of loyalty forbad him to join himself to the power
which was at that time warring against his sovereign. He speaks also of
another offer made to him by the Queen of Scotland of a generous salary if
he would settle in Scotland; but the country was too remote for his taste.
There is no authority for this offer except the De Vita Propria, and it is there
set down in terms which render it somewhat difficult to identify the Queen
aforesaid.[163]
As soon as he entered Milan, Ferrante Gonzaga, the Governor, desired to
secure his services as physician to the Duke of Mantua, his brother, offering
him thirty thousand gold crowns as honorarium; but, in spite of the
Governor's persuasions and threats, he would not accept the office. When
the news had come to Paris that Cardan was about to quit Britain, forty of
the most illustrious scientists of France repaired to Paris in order to hear
him expound the art of Medicine; but the disturbed state of the country
deterred him from setting foot in France. He refers to a letter from his friend
Ranconet as a testimony of the worship that was paid to him, and goes on to
say that, in his journeying through France and Germany, he fared much as
Plato fared at the Olympic games.
In a passage which Cardan wrote shortly after his return from Britain, he
lets it be seen that he was not ill-satisfied with the figure he then made in
the world. He writes—"Therefore, since all those with whom I am intimate
think well of me for my truth and probity, I can let my envious rivals
indulge themselves as they list in the shameful habit of evil-speaking. With
regard to folly, if I now utter, or ever have uttered, foolish words, let those
who accuse me show their evidence. I, who was born poor, with a weakly
body, in an age vexed almost incessantly by wars and tumults, helped on by
no family influence, but forced to contend against the bitter opposition of
the College at Milan, contrived to overcome all the plots woven against me,
and open violence as well. All the honours which a physician can possess I
either enjoy, or have refused when they were offered to me. I have raised
the fortunes of my family, and have lived a blameless life. I am well known
to all men of worship, and to the whole of Europe. What I have written has
been lauded; in sooth, I have written of so many things and at such length,
that a man could scarcely read my works if he spent his life therewith. I
have taken good care of my domestic affairs, and by common consent I

have come off victor in every contest I have tried. I have refused always to
flatter the great; and over and beyond this I have often set myself in active
opposition to them. My name will be found scattered about the pages of
many writers. I shall deem my life long enough if I come in perfect health
to the age of fifty-six. I have been most fortunate as the discoverer of many
and important contributions to knowledge, as well as in the practice of my
art and in the results attained; so much so that if my fame in the first
instance has raised up envy against me, it has prevailed finally, and
extinguished all ill-feeling."[164]
These words were written before the publication of the Geniturarum
Exempla in 1554. Cardan's life for the six years which followed was busy
and prosperous, but on the whole uneventful. The Archbishop of St.
Andrews wrote to him according to promise at the end of two years to give
an account of the results of his treatment. His letter is worthy of remark as
showing that he, the person most interested, was well satisfied with
Cardan's skill as a physician. Michael, the Archbishop's chief chamberlain,
was the bearer thereof, and as Hamilton speaks of him as "epistolam
vivam," it is probable that he bore likewise certain verbal messages which
could be more safely carried thus than in writing. A sentence in the De Vita
Propria,[165] mixed up with the account of Hamilton's cure, seems to refer
to this embassy, and to suggest that Michael was authorized to promise
Cardan a liberal salary if he would accept permanent office in the Primate's
household. Moreover, Hamilton writes somewhat querulously about
Cassanate's absence abroad on a visit to his family, a fact which would
make him all the more eager to secure Cardan's services. His letter runs as
follows—"Two of your most welcome letters, written some months ago, I
received by the hand of an English merchant; others came by the care of the
Lord Bishop of Dunkeld, together with the Indian balsam. The last were
from Scoto, who sent at the same time your most scholarly comments on
that difficult work of Ptolemy.[166] To all that you have written to me I have
replied fully in three or four letters of my own, but I know not whether, out
of all I have written, any letter of mine has reached you. But now I have
directed that a servant of mine, who is known to you, and who is travelling
to Rome, shall wait upon you and salute you in my name, and bear to you
my gratitude, not only for the various gifts I have received from you, but
likewise because my health is well-nigh restored, the ailment which vexed

me is driven away, my strength increased, and my life renewed. Wherefore
I rate myself debtor for all these benefits, as well as this very body of mine.
For, from the time when I began to take these medicines of yours, selected
and compounded with so great skill, my complaint has afflicted me less
frequently and severely; indeed, now, as a rule, I am not troubled therewith
more than once a month; sometimes I escape for two months."[167]
In the following year (1555) Cardan's daughter Chiara, who seems to have
been a virtuous and well-conducted girl, was married to Bartolomeo Sacco,
a young Milanese gentleman of good family, a match which proved to be
fortunate. Cardan had now reached that summit of fame against which the
shafts of jealousy will always be directed. The literary manners of the age
certainly lacked urbanity, and of all living controversialists there was none
more truculent than Julius Cæsar Scaliger, who had begun his career as a
man of letters by a fierce assault upon Erasmus with regard to his
Ciceronianus, a leading case amongst the quarrels of authors. Erasmus he
had attacked for venturing to throw doubts upon the suitability of Cicero's
Latin as a vehicle of modern thought; this quarrel was over a question of
form; and now Scaliger went a step farther, and, albeit he knew little of the
subject in hand, published a book of Esoteric Exercitations to show that the
De Subtilitate of Cardan was nothing but a tissue of nonsense.[168] The book
was written with all the heavy-handed brutality he was accustomed to use,
but it did no hurt to Cardan's reputation, and, irritable as he was by nature, it
failed to provoke him to make an immediate rejoinder, a delay which was
the cause of one of the most diverting incidents in the whole range of
literary warfare.
Scaliger sat in his study, eagerly expecting a reply, but Cardan took no
notice of the attack. Then one day some tale-bearer, moved either by the
spirit of tittle-tattle or the love of mischief, brought to Julius Cæsar the
news that Jerome Cardan had sunk under his tremendous battery of abuse,
and was dead. It is but bare charity to assume that Scaliger was touched by
some stings of regret when he heard what had been the fatal result of his
onslaught; still there can be little doubt that his mind was filled with a
certain satisfaction when he reflected that he was in sooth a terrible
assailant, and that his fist was heavier than any other man's. In any case, he
felt that it behoved him to make some sign, wherefore he sat down and

penned a funeral oration over his supposed victim, which is worth giving at
length.[169]
"At this season, when fate has dealt with me in a fashion so wretched and
untoward that it has connected my name with a cruel public calamity, when
a literary essay of mine, well known to the world, and undertaken at the call
of duty, has ensued in dire misfortune, it seems to me that I am bound to
bequeath to posterity a testimony that, sharp as may have been the vexation
brought upon Jerome Cardan by my trifling censures, the grief which now
afflicts me on account of his death is ten times sharper. For, even if Cardan
living should have been a terror to me, I, who am but a single unit in the
republic of letters, ought to have postponed my own and singular
convenience to the common good, seeing how excellent were the merits of
this man, in every sort of learning. For now the republic is bereft of a great
and incomparable scholar, and must needs suffer a loss which,
peradventure, none of the centuries to come will repair. What though I am a
person of small account, I could count upon him as a supporter, a judge, and
(immortal gods) even a laudator of my lucubrations; for he was so greatly
impressed by their weighty merits, that he deemed he would best defend
himself by avoiding all comment on the same, despairing of his own
strength, and knowing not how great his powers really were. In this respect
he was so skilful a master, that he could assuredly have fathomed the depths
of every method and every device used against him, and would thereby
have made his castigation of myself to serve as an augmentation of his own
fame. He, in sooth, was a man of such quality that, if he had deemed it a
thing demanded of him by equity, he would never have hesitated to point
out to other students the truth of those words which I had written against
him as an accusation, while, on the other hand, this same constancy of mind
would have made him adhere to the opinions he might have put forth in the
first instance, so far as these opinions were capable of proof. I, when I
addressed my Exercitations to him during his life—to him whom I knew by
common report to be the most ingenious and learned of mortal men—was
in good hope that I might issue from this conflict a conqueror; and is there
living a man blind enough not to perceive that what I looked for was hard-
earned credit, which I should certainly have won by finding my views
confirmed by Cardan living, and not for inglorious peace brought about by
his death? And indeed I might have been suffered to have share in the

bounty and kindliness of this illustrious man, whom I have always heard
described as a shrewd antagonist and one full of confidence in his own high
position, for it was an easy task to win from him the ordinary rights of
friendship by any trifling letter, seeing that he was the most courteous of
mankind. It is scarcely likely that I, weary as I was, one who in fighting had
long been used to perils of all sorts, should thus cast aside my courage; that
I, worn out by incessant controversies and consumed by the daily wear and
tear of writing, should care for an inglorious match with so distinguished an
antagonist; or that I should have set my heart upon winning a bare victory
in the midst of all this dust and tumult. For not only was the result which
has ensued unlooked for in the nature of things and in the opinion of all
men qualified to judge in such a case; it was also the last thing I could have
desired to happen, for the sake of my good name. My judgment has ever
been that all men (for in sooth all of us are, so to speak, little less than
nothing) may so lose their heads in controversy that they may actually fight
against their own interests. And if such a mischance as this may happen to
any man of eminence—as has been my case, and the case of divers others I
could recall—it shall not be written down in the list of his errors, unless in
aftertimes he shall seek to justify the same. It is necessary to advance
roughness in the place of refinement, and stubborn tenacity for
steadfastness. No man can be pronounced guilty of offence on the score of
some hasty word or other which may escape his lips; such a charge should
rather be made when he defends himself by unworthy methods. Therefore if
Cardan during his life, being well advised in the matter, should have kept
silent over my attempts to correct him, what could have brought me greater
credit than this? He would have bowed to my opinion in seemly fashion,
and would have taken my censures as those of a father or a preceptor. But
supposing that he had ventured to engage in a sharper controversy with me
over this question, is there any one living who would fail to see that he
might have gone near to lose his wits on account of the mental agitation
which had afflicted him in the past? But as soon as his superhuman intellect
had thoroughly grasped the question, it seemed to him that he must needs
be called upon to bear what was intolerable. He could not pluck up courage
enough to bear it by living, so he bore it by dying. Moreover, what he might
well have borne, he could not bring himself to bear, to wit that he and I
should come to an agreement and should formulate certain well-balanced
decisions for the common good. For this reason I lament deeply my share in

this affair, I who had most obvious reasons for engaging in this conflict, and
the clearest ones for inventing a story as to the victory I hoped to gain;
reasons which a man of sober temper could never anticipate, which a brave
man would never desire.
"Cardan's fame has its surest foundation in the praise of his adversaries. I
lament greatly this misfortune of our republic: the causes of which the
parliament of lettered men may estimate by its particular rules, but it cannot
rate this calamity in relation to the excellences of this illustrious personality.
For in a man of learning three properties ought to stand out pre-eminently—
a spotless and gentle rule of life; manifold and varied learning; and
consummate talent joined to the shrewdest capacity for forming a judgment.
These three points Cardan attained so completely that he seemed to have
been made entirely for himself, and at the same time to have been the only
mortal made for mankind at large. No one could be more courteous to his
inferiors or more ready to discuss the scheme of the universe with any man
of mark with whom he might chance to foregather. He was a man of kingly
courtesy, of sympathetic loftiness of mind, one fitted for all places, for all
occasions, for all men and for all fortunes. In reference to learning itself, I
beg you to look around upon the accomplished circle of the learned now
living on the earth, in this most fortunate age of ours; here the combination
of individual talent shows us a crowd of illustrious men, but each one of
these displays himself as occupied with some special portion of Philosophy.
But Cardan, in addition to his profound knowledge of the secrets of God
and Nature, was a consummate master of the humaner letters, and was wont
to expound the same with such eloquence that those who listened to him
would have been justified in affirming that he could have studied nothing
else all his life. A great man indeed! Great if he could lay claim to no other
excellence than this; and forsooth, when we come to consider the quickness
of his wit, his fiery energy in everything he undertook, whether of the least
or the greatest moment, his laborious diligence and unconquerable
steadfastness, I affirm that the man who shall venture to compare himself
with Cardan may well be regarded as one lacking in all due modesty. I
forsooth feel no hostility towards one whose path never crossed mine, nor
envy of one whose shadow never touched mine; the numerous and weighty
questions dealt with in his monumental work urged me on to undertake the
task of gaining some knowledge of the same. After the completion of the

Commentaries on Subtlety, he published as a kind of appendix to these that
most learned work the De Rerum Varietate. And in this case, before news
was brought to me of his death, I followed my customary practice, and in
the course of three days compiled an Excursus in short chapters. When I
heard that he was dead I brought them together into one little book, in order
that I also might lend a hand in this great work of his, and this thing I did
after a fashion which he himself would have approved, supposing that at
some time or other he might have held discourse with me, or with some
other yet more learned man, concerning his affairs."[170]
It is a matter of regret that this cry of peccavi was not published till all the
chief literary contemporaries of Scaliger were in their graves. As it did not
appear till 1621, the men of his own time were not able to enjoy the shout
of laughter over his discomfiture which would surely have gone up from
Paris and Strasburg and Basel and Zurich. Estienne and Gessner would
hardly have felt acute sorrow at a flout put upon Julius Cæsar Scaliger.
Crooked-tempered as he was, Cardan, compared with Scaliger, was as a
rose to a thistle, but there were reasons altogether unconnected with the
personalities of the disputants which swayed the balance to Cardan's
advantage. The greater part of Scaliger's criticism was worthless, and the
opinion of learned Europe weighed overwhelmingly on Cardan's side.
Thuanus,[171] who assuredly did not love him, and Naudé, who positively
disliked him, subsequently gave testimony in his favour. He did not follow
the example of Erasmus, and let Scaliger's abuse go by in silence, but he
took the next wisest course. He published a short and dignified reply, Actio
prima in Calumniatorem, in which, from title-page to colophon, Scaliger's
name never once occurs. The gist of the book may best be understood by
quoting an extract from the criticism of Cardan by Naudé prefixed to the De
Vita Propria. He writes: "This proposition of mine will best be
comprehended by the man who shall set to work to compare Cardan with
Julius Cæsar Scaliger, his rival, and a man endowed with an intellect almost
superhuman. For Scaliger, although he came upon the stage with greater
pomp and display, and brought with him a mind filled with daring
speculation, and adequate to the highest flights, kept closely behind the
lattices of the humaner letters and of medical philosophy, leaving to Cardan
full liberty to occupy whatever ground of argument he might find most
advantageous in any other of the fields of learning. Moreover, if any one

shall give daily study to these celebrated Exercitations, he will find therein
nothing to show that Cardan is branded by any mark of shame which may
not be removed with the slightest trouble, if the task be undertaken in a
spirit of justice. For, in the first place, who can maintain that Scaliger was
justified in publishing his Exercitations three years after the issue of the
second edition of the Libri de Subtilitate, without ever having taken the
trouble to read this edition, and without exempting from censure the errors
which Cardan had diligently expunged from his book in the course of his
latest revision, lest he (Scaliger) should find that all the mighty labour
expended over his criticisms had been spent in vain? Besides, who does not
know that Cardan, in his Actio prima in Calumniatorem, blunted the point
of all his assailant's weapons, swept away all his objections, and broke in
pieces all his accusations, in such wise that the very reason of their
existence ceased to be? Cardan, in sooth, was a true man, and held all
humanity as akin to him. There is small reason why we should marvel that
he erred now and again; it is a marvel much greater that he should only
have gone astray so seldom and in things of such trifling moment. Indeed I
will dare to affirm, and back my opinion with a pledge, that the errors
which Scaliger left behind him in these Exercitations were more in number
than those which he so wantonly laid to Cardan's charge, having sweated
nine years over the task. And this he did not so much in the interests of true
erudition as with the desire of coming to blows with all those whom he
recognized as the chiefs of learning."
During the whole dispute Cardan kept his temper admirably. Scaliger was a
physician of repute; and it is not improbable that the spectacle of Cardan's
triumphal progress back to Milan from the North may have aroused his
jealousy and stimulated him to make his ill-judged attack. But even on the
ground of medical science he was no match for Cardan, while in
mathematics and philosophy he was immeasurably inferior. Cardan felt
probably that the attack was nothing more than the buzzing of a gadfly, and
that in any case it would make for his own advantage and credit, wherefore
he saw no reason why he should disquiet himself; indeed his attitude of
dignified indifference was admirably calculated to win for him the approval
of the learned world by the contrast it furnished to the raging fury of his
adversary.[172]

After the heavy labour of editing and issuing to the world the De Rerum
Varietate, and of re-editing the first issue of the De Subtilitate, Cardan
might well have given himself a term of rest, but to a man of his temper,
idleness, or even a relaxation of the strain, is usually irksome. The De
Varietate was first printed at Basel in 1553, and, as soon as it was out of the
press, it brought a trouble—not indeed a very serious one—upon the author.
The printer, Petrus of Basel (who must not be confused with Petreius of
Nuremberg) took it upon him to add to Chapter LXXX of the work some
disparaging remarks about the Dominican brotherhoods, making Cardan
responsible for the assertion that they were rapacious wolves who hunted
down reputed witches and despisers of God, not because of their offences,
but because they chanced to be the possessors of much wealth. Cardan
remonstrated at once—he always made it his practice to keep free from all
theological wrangling,—but Petrus treated the whole question with ridicule,
[173]
and it does not seem that Cardan could have had any very strong
feeling in the matter, for the obnoxious passage is retained in the editions of
1556 and 1557. The religious authorities were however fully justified in
assuming that the presence of such a passage in the pages of a book so
widely popular as the De Varietate would necessarily prove a cause of
scandal, and give cause to the enemy to blaspheme. For Reginald Scot, in
the eighth chapter of Discoverie of Witchcraft, alludes to the passage in
question in the following terms: "Cardanus writeth that the cause of such
credulitie consisteth in three points: to wit in the imagination of the
melancholike, in the constancie of them that are corrupt therewith, and in
the deceipt of the Judges; who being inquisitors themselves against
heretikes and witches, did both accuse and condemne them, having for their
labour the spoile of their goods. So as these inquisitors added many fables
hereunto, least they should seeme to have doone injurie to the poore
wretches, in condemning and executing them for none offense. But sithens
(said he) the springing up of Luther's sect, these priests have tended more
diligentlie upon the execution of them; bicause more wealth is to be caught
from them; insomuch as now they deale so looselie with witches (through
distrust of gaines) that all is seene to be malice, follie, or avarice that hath
beene practised against them. And whosoever shall search into this cause, or
read the cheefe writers hereupon, shall find his words true."

In 1554 Cardan published also with Petrus of Basel the Ptolemæi de
astrorum judiciis with the Geniturarum Exempla, bound in one volume, but
he seems to have written nothing but a book of fables for the young,
concerning which he subsequently remarks that, in his opinion, grown men
might read the same with advantage. It is a matter of regret that this work
should have disappeared, for it would have been interesting to note how far
Cardan's intellect, acute and many-sided as it was, was capable of dealing
with the literature of allegory and imagination. He has set down one fact
concerning it, to wit that it contained "multa de futuris arcana." The next
year he produced only a few medical trifles, but in 1557 he brought out two
other scientific works which he characterizes as admirable—one the Ars
parva curandi, and the other a treatise De Urinis. In the same year he
published the book which, in forming a judgment of him as a man and a
writer, is perhaps as valuable as the De Vita Propria and the De Utilitate, to
wit the De Libriis Propriis. This work exists in three forms: the first, a short
treatise, "cui titulus est ephemerus," is dedicated to "Hieronymum
Cardanum medicum, affinem suum," and has the date of 1543. The second
has the date of 1554, and, according to Naudé, was first published "apud
Gulielmum Rovillium sub scuto Veneto, Lugduni, 1557." The third was
begun in 1560,[174] and contains comments written in subsequent years. The
first is of slight interest, the second is a sort of register of his works,
amplified from year to year, while the third has more the form of a treatise,
and presents with some degree of symmetry the crude materials contained
in the first. Having finished with his writings up to the year 1564, Cardan
lapses into a philosophizing strain, and opens his discourse with the
ominous words, "Sed jam ad institutum revertamur, déque ipso vitæ
humanæ genere aliquo dicamus." He begins with a disquisition on the
worthlessness of life, and repeats somewhat tediously the story of his visit
to Scotland. He gives a synopsis of all the sciences he had ever studied—
Theology, Dialectics, Arithmetic, Music, Optics, Astronomy, Astrology,
Geometry, Chiromancy, Agriculture, Medicine, passing on to treat of
Magic, portents and warnings, and of his own experience of the same at the
crucial moments of his life. He ends by a reference to an incident already
chronicled in the De Vita Propria,[175] how he escaped death or injury from
a falling mass of masonry by crossing the street in obedience to an impulse
he could not explain, and speculates why God, who was able to save him on

this occasion with so little trouble, should have let him rush on and court
the overwhelming stroke which ultimately laid him low.

FOOTNOTES:
[162] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxii. p. 100.
[163] De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. 16: "cum Scotorum Regina cujus levirum
curaveram." Cardan had probably prescribed for a brother of the Duc de
Longueville, the first husband of Mary of Guise, during his sojourn in Paris.
[164] Geniturarum Exempla, p. 459.
[165] De Vita Propria, ch. xl. p. 137.
[166] Commentaria in Ptolemæi de Astrorum Judiciis (Basil, 1554). He wrote
these notes while going down the Loire in company with Cassanate on his way
from Lyons to Paris in 1552.—De Vita Propria, ch. xlv. p. 175.
He gives an interesting account (Opera, tom. i. p. 110) as to how the book first
came under his notice. The day before he quitted Lyons with Cassanate, a
school-master came to ask for advice, which Cardan gave gratis. Then the
patient, knowing perhaps the physician's taste for the marvellous, related how
there was a certain boy in the place who could see spirits by looking into an
earthen vessel, but Cardan was little impressed by what he saw, and began to
talk with the school-master about Archimedes. The school-master brought out a
work of the Greek philosopher with which was bound up the Ptolemæi Libri de
Judiciis. Cardan fastened upon it at once, and wanted to buy it, but the school-
master insisted that he should take it as a gift. He declares that his Commentaries
thereupon are the most perfect of all his writings. The book contains his famous
Nativity of Christ. A remark in De Libris Propriis (cf. Opera, tom. i. p. 67)
indicates that there was an earlier edition of Ptolemy, printed at Milan at
Cardan's own cost, because when he saw the numerous mistakes made by
Ottaviano Scoto in printing the De Malo Medendi and the De Consolatione, he
determined to go to another printer.
[167] Opera, tom. i. p. 93.
[168] Cardan notices the attack in these words—"His diebus quidam
conscripserat adversus nostrum de Subtilitate librum, Opus ingens. Adversus
quem ego Apologiam scripsi."—Opera, tom. i. p. 117. Scaliger absurdly calls his
work the fifteenth book of Exercitations, and wished the world to believe that he
had written, though not printed, the fourteen others.
[169] It was not printed until many years after the deaths of both disputants, and
appeared for the first time in a volume of Scaliger's letters and speeches
published at Toulouse in 1621, and it was afterwards affixed to the De Vita
Propria.

[170] "Si Scaliger avoit eu un peu moins de démangeaison de contre dire, il
auroit acquis plus de gloire, qu'il n'a fait dans ce combat: mais, ce que les Grecs
ont apellé άμετρία τη̑ϛ άνθολκη̑ϛ, une passion excessive de prendre le contrepied
des autres, a fait grand tort à Scaliger. C'est par ce principe qu'il a soutenu que le
perroquet est une très laide bête. Si Cardan l'eût dit, Scaliger lui eût opposé ce
qu'on trouve dans les anciens Poètes touchant la beauté de cet oiseau. Vossius a
fait une Critique très judicieuse de cette humeur contrariante de Scaliger, et a
marqué en même temps en quoi ces deux Antagonistes étoient supérieurs et
inférieures, l'un à l'autre."—(Scaliger, in Exercitat., 246.) "Quia Cardanus
psittacum commendarat a colorum varietate ac præterea fulgore, quod et
Appuleius facit in secundo Floridorum, contra contendit esse deformem, non
modo ob fœditatem rostri, ac crurum, et linguæ, sed etiam quia sit coloris fusci
ac cinericii, qui tristis. Quid faciamus summo Viro? Si Cardanus ea dixisset,
provocasset ad judicia poëtarum, atque adeo omnium hominum. Nunc quia
pulchri dixit coloris, ille deformis contendit. Hoc contradictionis studium, quod
ubique in hisce exercitationibus se prodit, sophista dignius est, quamque
philosopho."—Bayle: Article "Cardan." (Sir Thomas Browne, in one of his
Commonplace Books, observes—"If Cardan saith a parrot is a beautiful bird,
Scaliger will set his wits on work to prove it a deformed animal.")
Naudé (Apologie, ch. xiii.) says that of the great men of modern times Scaliger
and Cardan each claimed the possession of a guardian spirit, and hints that
Scaliger may have been moved to make this claim in order not to be outdone by
his great antagonist. It should, however, be remembered that Cardan did not
seriously assert this belief till long after his controversy with Scaliger. Naudé
sums up thus: "D'où l'on peut juger asseurement, que lui et Scaliger n'ont point
eu d'autre Genie que la grande doctrine qu'ils s'étoient acquis par leurs veilles,
par leurs travaux, et par l'expérience qu'ils avoient des choses sur lesquelles
venant à élever leur jugement ils jugeoint pertinemment de toutes matières, et ne
laissoient rien échapper qui ne leur fust conneu et manifeste."
[171] Thuanus, ad Annum MDLXXVI, part of the Appendix to the De Vita
Propria.
[172] Cardan does not seem to have harboured animosity against Scaliger. In the
De Vita Propria, ch. xlviii. p. 198, he writes: "Julius Cæsar Scaliger plures mihi
titulos ascribit, quam ego mihi concedi postulassem, appellans ingenium
profundissimum, felicissimum, et incomparabile."
[173] "Quid tua interest quod quatuor verba adjecerim? an hoc tantum crimen
est! quid facerem absens absenti?" Cardan writes on in meditative strain:
"Cœterum cum non ignorem maculatos fuisse codices B. Hieronimi, atque
aliorum patrum nostrorum, ab his qui aliter sentiebant, erroremque suum
auctoritate viri tegere voluerunt: ut ne quis in nostris operibus hallucinetur vel ab
aliis decipiatur, sciant omnes me nullibi Theologum agere, nec velle in alienam
messem falcem ponere."—Opera, tom. i. p. 112.
Johannes Wierus, one of the first rationalists on the subject of witchcraft, has
quoted largely from Chapter LXXX of De Varietate in his book De Præstigiis
Dæmonum, in urging his case against the orthodox view.

[174] Opera, tom. i. p. 96. "Annus hic est Salutis millesimus quingentesimus ac
sexagesimus."
[175] De Vita Propria, ch. xxx. p. 78.

CHAPTER IX
The year 1555 may be held to mark the point of time at which Cardan
reached the highest point of his fortunes. After a long and bitter struggle
with an adverse world he had come out a conqueror, and his rise to fame
and opulence, if somewhat slow, had been steady and secure. He longed for
wealth, not that he might figure as a rich man, but so that he might win the
golden independence which permits a student to prosecute the task which
seems to subserve the highest purposes of true learning, and frees him from
the irksome battle for daily bread. He loved, indeed, to spend money over
beautiful things, and there are few more attractive touches in the picture he
draws of himself than the confession of his passion for costly penholders,
gems, rare books, vessels of brass and silver, and painted spheres.[176] In
this brief season of ease and security, there were no flaming portents in the
sky to foretell the cruel stroke of evil fortune which was destined so soon to
fall upon him.
Cardan has left a very pathetic sketch of his own miserable boyhood in the
strangely ordered home in Milan, with his callous, tyrannical father, his
quick-tempered mother, and the superadded torment of his Aunt Margaret's
presence. Fazio Cardano was a man of rigorous sobriety, and he seems
moreover to have atoned for his early irregularities by the practice of that
austere piety which Jerome notices more than once as a characteristic of his
old age.[177] The discipline was hard, and the life unlovely, but the home
was at least decent and orderly, and no opportunities or provocations to
loose manners or ill doing existed therein. In Cardan's own case it is to be
feared that, after Lucia's death, the affairs of his household fell into dire
confusion, in spite of the presence of his mother-in-law, Thadea, who had
come to him as housekeeper—her husband, Altobello, having died soon
after the marriage of his daughter with Cardan. He was an ardent lover of
music, and, as a consequence, his house would be constantly filled with
singing men and boys, a tribe of somewhat sinister reputation.[178] Then,
when he was not engaged with music, he would be gambling in some
fashion or other. After lamenting the vast amount of time he has wasted

over the game of chess, he goes on: "But the play with the dice, an evil far
more noxious, found its way into my house; and, after my sons had learned
to play the same, my doors always stood open to dicers. I can find no
excuse for this practice except the trivial one, that, what I did, I did in the
hope of relieving the poverty of my children."[179] In a home of this sort,
ruled by a father who was assuredly more careful of his work in the study
and class-room than of his duties as paterfamilias, it is not wonderful that
the two young men, Gian Battista and Aldo, should grow up into worthless
profligates. It has been recorded how Cardan, during a journey to Genoa,
wrote a Book of Precepts for his children,[180] a task the memory of which
afterwards wrung from him a cry of despair. There never was compiled a
more admirable collection of maxims; but, excellent as they were, it was
not enough to write them down on paper; and the young men, if ever they
took the trouble to read them, must have smiled as they called to mind the
difference between their father's practices and the precepts he had
composed for their guidance. Furthermore, he had written at length, in the
De Consolatione, on the folly which parents for the most part display in the
education of their children. "They show their affection in such foolish wise,
that it would be nearer the mark to say they hate, rather than love, their
offspring. They bring them up not to follow virtue, but to occupy
themselves with all manner of hurtful things; not to learning, but to riot; not
to the worship of God, but to foster in them the desire to drain the cup of
lustful pleasure; not for the life eternal, but to the enticements of lechery."
[181]

At this time Gian Battista had gained the doctorate of medicine at Pavia,
and had made his contribution to medical knowledge by the publication of
an insignificant tract, De cibis fœtidis non edendis. Cardan was evidently
full of hope for his elder son's career, but Aldo seems to have been a trouble
from the first. Yet, in casting Aldo's horoscope (probably at the time of his
birth) Cardan predicts for him a flourishing future.[182] Never was there
made a worse essay in prophecy. Aldo's childhood had been a sickly one.
He had well-nigh died of convulsions, and later on he had been troubled
with dysentery, abscesses of the brain, and a fever which lasted six months.
Moreover, he could not walk till he was three years old. With a weakly
body, his nature seems to have put forth all sorts of untoward growths.
There is a story which Naudé brings forward as part of his indictment

against Cardan, that the father being irritated beyond endurance by some ill
conduct of his younger son during supper, cut off his ear by way of
punishment. It was a most barbarous act; one going far beyond the range of
any tradition of the early patria potestas, which may have yet lingered in
Italy; and scarcely calculated to bring about reformation in the youth thus
punished. In any case, Aldo went on from bad to worse; at one time his
father found it necessary to place him under restraint, and the last record of
him is that one in Cardan's testament, by which he was disinherited.
Gian Battista's failings were doubtless grave and numerous, but he had at
least sufficient industry to qualify himself as a physician. He was certainly
his father's favourite child, and on this account the eulogies written of him
in those dark hours when Cardan's reason was reeling under the
accumulated blows of private grief and public disgrace, must be accepted
with caution. There is no evidence to show he was in intellect anything like
the budding genius his father deemed him; as to conduct and manner of life,
his carriage was exactly what the majority of youths, brought up in a similar
fashion, would have adopted. There must have been something in the young
man's humours which from the first made his father apprehensive as to the
future, for Cardan soon came to see that an early marriage would be the
surest safeguard for Gian Battista's future. With his mind bent on this
scheme, he pointed out to his son various damsels of suitable station, any
one of whom he would be ready to welcome into his family, but Gian
Battista always found some excuse for declining matrimony. He declared
that he was too closely engaged with his work; and, over and beyond this, it
would not be seemly to bring home a bride into a house like their own, full
of young men, for Cardan, as usual, had several pupils living with him. It
was at the end of 1557 that the first forebodings of misfortune appeared. To
Cardan, according to custom, they came in the form of a portent, for he
records how he lay awake at midnight on December 20, and was suddenly
conscious that his bed was shaking. He at once attributed this to a shock of
an earthquake, and in the morning he demanded of the servant, Simone
Sosia, who occupied the truckle bed in the room, whether he had felt the
same. Simone replied that he had, whereupon Cardan, as soon as he arose,
went to the piazza and asked of divers persons he met there, whether they
had also been disturbed, but no one had felt anything of the shock he
alluded to. He went home, and while the family were at table, a messenger,

sent, as he afterwards records, by a certain woman of the town,[183] entered
the room, and told him that his son was going to be married immediately
after breakfast. Cardan asked who the bride might be, but the messenger
said he knew not, and departed. It is not quite clear whether Gian Battista
was present or not, but as soon as ever the messenger had departed, Cardan
let loose an indignant outburst over his son's misconduct, reproaching him
with undutiful secresy, and setting forth how he had introduced to him four
young ladies of good family, of whom two were certainly enamoured of
him. Any one of the four would have been acceptable as a daughter-in-law,
but he declared that now he would insist upon having full information as to
the antecedents of any other bride his son might have selected, before
admitting her to the shelter of his roof. Over and over again had he
counselled Gian Battista that he must on no account marry in haste, or
without his advice, or without making sure that his income would be
sufficient to support the responsibilities of the married state; rather than this
should happen, he would willingly allow the young man to keep a mistress
in the house for the sake of offspring, for he desired beyond all else to rear
grandchildren from Gian Battista, because he nursed the belief that, as the
son resembled his grandfather Fazio, so the son's children would resemble
their grandfather—himself. When he was questioned, Gian Battista declared
he knew nothing about the report, and was fully as astonished as his father;
but two days later Gian Battista's own servant came to the house, and
announced that his master had been married that same morning,[184] but that
he knew not the name of the bride. Cardan now ascertained that Gian
Battista's disinclination for matrimony had arisen from the fact that he had
been amusing himself with a girl who was nothing else than an attractive
and finely-dressed harlot, named Brandonia Seroni, the last woman in all
Milan whom he could with decency receive into his house. And the pitiful
story was not yet complete. In marrying her the foolish youth had burdened
himself with her mother, two or more sisters, and three brothers, the last-
named being rough fellows without any calling but that of common
soldiers. The character of the girl herself may be judged by the answer
given by her father Evangelista Seroni to Cardan during the subsequent
trial. When Seroni was asked whether he had given his daughter as a virgin
in marriage, he answered frankly in the negative.

Cardan at once made up his mind to shut his door upon the newly-married
pair; but the unconquerable tenderness he felt for Gian Battista urged him
on to send to the young man all the ready money he had saved. After two
years of married life, two children, a boy and a girl, were born: husband and
wife alike were in ill health, and every day brought its domestic quarrel. In
the meantime sinister whispers were heard, set going in the first instance by
the mother and sister of Brandonia, that Gian Battista was the father neither
of the first nor of the second child. They even went so far as to designate
the men to whom they rightly belonged, and contrived that this rumour
should come to the ears of the injured husband. The consequence of their
malignant tale-bearing was a quarrel more violent than ever, and the rise of
a resolution in Gian Battista's mind to rid himself at all hazard of the
accursed burden he had bound upon his shoulders.
Until the end of 1559 Cardan continued to live in Milan, vexed no doubt by
the ever-present spectacle of the wretched case into which his beloved son
had fallen. He records how the young wife, unknown to her husband,
handed over to her father the wedding-ring which he (Cardan) had given to
his son, along with a piece of silken stuff, in order to pledge them for
money. This outrage, joined to the certain conviction that his wife was false
to him, proved a provocation beyond the limits of Gian Battista's patience,
and finally incited him to make a criminal attempt upon Brandonia's life.
Hitherto he had been earnest enough in his desire to rid himself of his wife
so long as she raged against him; but, on the restoration of peace, his anger
against her would vanish. Now he had lost all patience; he laid his plans
advisedly, and set to work to execute them by enlisting the cooperation of
the servant who had been with him ever since his marriage, and by taking to
live with him in his own house Seroni, his wife, and son and daughter.[185]
It cannot be said that the would-be murderer displayed at this juncture any
of the traditional Italian craft in setting about his deadly task. The day
before the attempt was made he took out of pawn the goods which
Evangelista Seroni had pledged, and promised his servant a gift of clothes
and money if he would compass the death of Brandonia, who was still
ailing from the effects of her second confinement. To this suggestion the
servant, who had also warned Gian Battista of his wife's misconduct, at
once assented.

But even on the very day when he had fully determined to make his essay in
murder he vacillated again and again, and it seemed likely that Brandonia
would once more be reprieved. When he entered her bed-chamber, full of
his resolve to strike for freedom, he found her lying gravely ill with an
attack of fever, shivering violently, and cold at the extremities. His anger
forthwith vanished, and his hand was stayed; but as if urged on by ruthless
fate, the mother-in-law, and the sister, and Brandonia herself, ill as she was,
attacked Gian Battista with the foulest abuse and reproaches; this was the
last straw. He went out and sought his servant, and told the fellow at once to
make a cake and put a poison therein. The date of this fatal action was some
day early in 1560.
On October 1, 1559, Cardan had left Milan, and gone back to Pavia to
resume his work as professor, taking Aldo with him. He threw himself into
the discharge of his office and the life of the city with his customary ardour.
Over and above his work of teaching he completed his treatise De Secretis,
and likewise found time to hold a long disputation on the decisions of Galen
with Andrea Camutio, one of the most illustrious physicians of the age.
Concerning this episode he writes: "In disputation I showed myself so keen
of wit that all men marvelled at the instances I brought forward, but for a
long time no one ventured to put me to the proof. Thus I escaped the trouble
of any such undertaking until two accidents both unforeseen involved me
therein. At Pavia, Branda Porro, my whilom teacher in Philosophy,
interrupted me one day when I was disputing with Camutio[186] on some
matter of Philosophy, for, as I have said before, my colleagues were wont to
lead me on to argue in philosophy because they were well assured that it
would be vain to try to get the better of me in Medicine. Now Branda began
by advancing Aristotle as an authority, whereupon I, when he brought out
his citation, said, 'Take care, you have left out the "non" which should stand
after "album."' Then Branda contradicted me, and I, spitting out the phlegm
with which I am often troubled, told him quietly that he was in the wrong.
He sent for the Codex in great rage, and when it was brought I asked that it
might be given to me. I then read out the words just as they stood; but he, as
if he suspected that I was reading falsely, snatched the volume out of my
hands, and declared that I was puting a cheat upon my hearers. When he
came to the word in dispute he held his tongue forthwith, and all the others
looked at me in amazement."[187]

It is certain that Cardan was still vexed in mind by the trouble he had left
behind him at Milan. If he had not forgiven Gian Battista, he was full of
kindly thought of him. He sent him from Pavia a new silk cloak, such as
physicians wear, so that he might make a better show in his calling, and
doubtless continued his supplies of money. Just a week before the quarrel
last recorded, Aldo, against his father's wish, left Pavia and returned to
Milan. Cardan used every argument he could bring forward to keep his
younger son with him, but in vain; and, as he was unwilling to put
constraint upon him, Aldo departed. Cardan says that he was within an ace
of going with him, for the University was then in vacation: then the
crowning catastrophe might have been averted, but the same fate which was
driving on the son to destruction, kept the father at Pavia. Thus it happened
that Aldo was an inmate of his brother's house when the poisoned cake was
made. Cardan has written down a detailed account of the perpetration of
this squalid tragedy, and no clearer presentation can be given than the one
which his own words supply.
He writes: "Thus my son and the servant went together to make the cake,
and the servant put therein secretly some of the poison which had been
given him. After the cake had been made, a small piece was given to my
son's wife, who was very ill at the time, but her stomach rejected it at once.
Her mother ate some of it, and likewise vomited after taking it. Though
Gian Battista saw what happened he did not believe that the cake was really
poisoned, for two reasons. First, because he had not, in truth, ordered that
the poison should be mixed therewith; and second, because his brother-in-
law (Bartolomeo Sacco) had said to him, before the cake was finished, 'See
that you make it big enough, for I also am minded to taste it.' Next he gave
some to his father-in-law, who straightway vomited, and complained of a
pricking of the tongue. He warned my son; but he, still holding that the cake
was harmless, ate thereof somewhat greedily; and, after having been sick,
had to lie by for some time. On the second day after this Gian Battista, and
his brother, and the servant as well were taken in hold: and on the Sunday
following I, having been informed of what had happened, went to Milan in
great anxiety as to what I should do."
The news which had been brought to Cardan at Pavia told him, over and
beyond what is written above, that his son's wife was dead, poisoned as
every one believed through having eaten the cake, which had caused nausea

and pain to every one else who had tasted it.[188] The catastrophe was
accompanied by the usual portents. Some weeks previous to the attempt
Gian Battista had chanced to walk out to the Porta Tonsa, clad in the smart
silk gown which his father had recently given him, and as he was passing a
butcher's shop, a certain pig, one of a drove which was there, rose up out of
the mud and attacked the young physician and befouled his gown. The
butcher and his men, to whom the thing seemed portentous, drove off the
hog with staves, but this they could only do after the beast had wearied
itself, and after Gian Battista had gone away. Again, at the beginning of
February following, while Cardan was in residence as a Professor at Pavia,
he chanced to look at the palm of his hand, and there, at the root of the third
finger of the right hand, he beheld a mark like a bloody sword. That same
evening a messenger arrived from Milan with the news of his son's arrest,
and a letter from his son-in-law, begging him to come at once. The mark on
his hand grew and grew for fifty-three days, gradually mounting up the
finger, until the last fatal day, when it extended to the tip of the finger, and
shone bright like fiery blood. The morning after Gian Battista's execution
the mark had almost vanished, and in a day or two no sign of it remained.
Cardan hurried to Milan to hear from Bartolomeo Sacco, his son-in-law, the
full extent of the calamity. Probably there were few people in the city who
did not regard Gian Battista as a worthless fellow, whose death would be a
gain to the State and a very light loss to his immediate friends, but Cardan
was not of this mind. He turned his back upon his professional engagements
at Pavia, and threw himself, heart and soul, into the fight for his son's life.
He could not make up his mind as to Gian Battista's recent conduct; if he
ate of the cake, he surely could not have put in poison himself, or directed
others to do so; if, on the other hand, he had poisoned the cake, Cardan
feared greatly that, in the simplicity of his nature, he would assuredly let his
accusers know what he had done. And his mind was greatly upset by the
prodigies of which he had recently had experience. For some reason or
other he did not visit the accused in prison, or give him any advice as to
what course he should follow, a piece of neglect which he cites as a
reproach against himself afterwards; but certain associates of Gian Battista,
and his fellow-captives as well, urged him to assert his innocence, a course
which Cardan recognized as the only safe one. At the first examination the
accused followed this counsel; at the second he began to waver when the

servant deposed that his master had given him a certain powder to mix with
Brandonia's food in order to increase her flow of milk; and, later on, when
confronted with the man from whom he had received the poison, he
confessed all; and, simpleton as he was, admitted that for two months past
his mind had been set upon the deed, and that on two previous occasions he
had attempted to administer to her the noxious drug against the advice of
his servant. From the first Cardan had placed his hopes of deliverance in the
intervention of the Milanese Governor, the Duca di Sessa, who had not long
ago consulted him as physician,[189] but the Duke refused to interfere. The
intervention of an executive officer in the procedure of a Court of Justice
was no rare occurrence at that period, and Cardan was deeply disappointed
at the squeamishness or indolence of his whilom patient. He records
afterwards how the Duke met his full share of the calamities which fell
upon all those who were concerned in Gian Battista's condemnation;[190]
and in the Dialogus Tetim, a work which he wrote immediately after the
trial, he bewails afresh the inaction of this excellent ruler and the
consequent loss of his son.[191]
For twenty days and more, while Gian Battista lay in prison, Cardan, almost
mad with apprehension and suspense, spent his time studying in the library
at Milan. Sitting there one day, he heard a warning voice which told him
that the thing he most feared had indeed come to pass. He felt that his heart
was broken, and, springing up, he rushed out into the court, where he met
certain of the Palavicini, the friends with whom he was staying, and cried
out, "Alas, alas, he was indeed privy to the death of his wife, and now he
has confessed it all, therefore he will be condemned to death and
beheaded." Then having caught up a garment he went out to the piazza, and,
before he had gone half-way he met his son-in-law, who asked him in
sorrowful tones whither he was going. Cardan answered that he was
troubled with apprehensions lest Gian Battista should have confessed his
crime, whereupon Bartolomeo Sacco told him that what he feared had
indeed come to pass. Gian Battista had admitted the truth of the charge
against him: he was ultimately put on his trial before the Senate of Milan,
[192]
the President of the Court being one Rigone, a man whom Cardan
afterwards accused of partiality and of a hostile bias towards the prisoner.
Cardan himself stood up to defend his son; but with a full confession staring
him in the face, he was sorely puzzled to fix upon a line of defence. This he

perceived must of necessity be largely rhetorical; and, after he had grasped
the entire situation, he set to work to convince the Court on two main
points, first, that Gian Battista was a youth of simple guileless character;
and, second, there was no proof that Brandonia had died of poison. A
physician of good repute, Vincenzo Dinaldo, swore that she had died of
fever (lipyria), and not from the effect of poison; and five others, men of the
highest character, declared that she bore no signs of poison, either
externally or internally. Her tongue and extremities and her body were not
blackened, nor was the stomach swollen, nor did the hair and nails show
any signs of falling, nor were the tissues eaten away. In the opening of his
defence Cardan attempted to discredit the character of Brandonia. He
showed how great were the injuries and provocations which Gian Battista
had received from her, and that she was a dissolute wanton; her father
himself, when under examination, having refused to say that she was a
virgin when she left his house to be married. He claimed justification for the
husband who should slay his wife convicted of adultery; and here, in this
case, Brandonia was convicted by her own confession. He maintained that,
if homicide is to be committed at all, poison is preferable to the knife, and
then he went on to weave a web of ineffectual casuistry in support of his
view, which moved the Court to pity and contempt. He cited the Lex
Cornelia, which doomed the common people to the arena, and the
patricians to exile, and claimed the penalty last-named as the one fitting to
the present case.[193] Then he proceeded to show that the woman had really
died from natural causes; for, even granting that she had swallowed arsenic
in the cake, she had vomited at once, and the poison would have no time to
do its work; moreover there was no proof that Gian Battista had given
specific directions to anybody to mix poison with the ingredients of the
cake. The most he had done was to utter some vague words thereanent to
his servant, who forthwith took the matter into his own hands.[194] If Gian
Battista had known, if he had merely been suspicious that the cake was
poisoned, would he have let a crumb of it pass his lips; and if any large
quantity of poison had been present, would he and the other persons who
had eaten thereof have recovered so quickly? Cardan next went on to argue
that, whatever motive may have swayed Gian Battista at this juncture, it
could not have been the deliberate intent to kill his wife, because forsooth
the wretched youth was incapable of deliberate action of any sort. He could
never keep in the same mood for four-and-twenty hours at a stretch. He

nursed alternately in his heart vengeance and forgiveness, changing as
discord or peace ruled in his house. Cardan showed what a life of misery
the wretched youth had passed since his marriage. Had this life continued,
the finger of shame would have been pointed at him, he must have lost his
status as a member of his profession, and have been cut off from the society
of all decent people; nay, he would most likely have died by the hand of one
or other of his wife's paramours. This was to show how powerful was the
temptation to which the husband was exposed, and again he sang the praises
of poison as an instrument of "removal"; because if effectively employed, it
led to no open scandal.
He next brought forward the simple and unsophisticated character of the
accused, and the physical afflictions which had vexed him all his life,
giving as illustrations of his son's folly the headlong haste with which he
had rushed into a marriage, his folly in giving an ineffectual dose, if he
really meant to poison his wife, in letting his plot be known to his servant,
and in confessing. Lastly, Cardan had in readiness one of his favourite
portents to lay before the Court. When Brandonia's brother had come into
the house and found his father and sister sick through eating the cake, he
suspected foul play and rushed at Gian Battista and at Aldo who was also
there, and threatened them with his sword; but before he could harm them
he fell down in a fit, his hand having been arrested by Providence.
Providence had thus shown pity to this wretched youth, and now Cardan
besought the Senate to be equally merciful.
Cardan's pleas were all rejected; indeed such issue was inevitable from the
first, if the Senate of Milan were not determined to abdicate the primary
functions of a judicial tribunal. Gian Battista was condemned to death, but a
strange condition was annexed to the sentence, to wit that his life would be
spared, if the prosecutors, the Seroni family, could be induced to consent.
But their consent was only to be gained by the payment of a sum of money
entirely beyond Cardan's means, their demand having been stimulated
through some foolish boasting of the family wealth by the condemned
prisoner.[195] Cardan was powerless to arrest the course of the law, and Gian
Battista was executed in prison on the night of April 7, 1560.
In the whole world of biographic record it would be hard to find a figure
more pathetic than that of Cardan fighting for the life of his unworthy son.

No other episode of his career wins from the reader sympathy half so deep.
The experience of these terrible days certainly shook still further off its
balance a mind not over steady in its calmest moments. Cardan wrote
voluminously and laboriously over Gian Battista's fate, but in his dirges and
lamentations he never lets fall an expression of detestation or regret with
regard to the crime itself: all his soul goes out in celebrating the charm and
worth of his son, and in moaning over the ruin of mind, body, and estate
which had fallen upon him through this cruel stroke of adverse fate. When
he sat down to write the De Vita Propria, Cardan was strongly possessed
with the belief that all through his career he had been subject to continuous
and extraordinary persecution at the hands of his enemies. The entire
thirtieth chapter is devoted to the description of these plots and assaults. In
his earlier writings he attributes his calamities to evil fate and the influences
of the stars; his wit was indeed great, and assuredly it was allied to
madness, so it is not impossible that these personal foes who dogged his
steps were largely the creatures of an old man's monomaniacal fancies. The
persecution, he affirms, began to be so bitter as to be almost intolerable
after the condemnation of Gian Battista. "Certain members of the Senate
afterwards admitted (though I am sure they would be loth that men should
hold them capable of such a wish) that they condemned my son to death in
the hope that I might be killed likewise, or at least might lose my wits, and
the powers above can bear witness how nearly one of these ills befell me. I
would that you should know what these times were like, and what practices
were in fashion. I am well assured that I never wrought offence to any of
these men, even by my shadow. I took advice how I might put forward a
defence of some kind on my son's behalf, but what arguments would have
prevailed with minds so exasperated against me as were theirs?"[196]

FOOTNOTES:
[176] De Vita Propria, p. 57.
[177] "In ore illud semper ei erat: Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum, qui ipse est
fons omnium virtutum."—De Vita Propria, ch. iii. p. 7. Reginald Scot, in the
Discoverie of Witchcraft, says that the aforesaid exclamation of Fazio was the
Paracelsian charm to drive away spirits that haunt any house. There is a passage
in De Consolatione (Opera, tom. i. p. 600) which gives Fazio's view of
happiness after death:—"Memineram patrem meum, Facium Cardanum, cum
viveret, in ore semper habuisse, se mortem optare, quod nullum suavius tempus

experiretur, quā id in quo profundissime dormiens omnium quæ in hac vita fiunt
expers esset."
[178] Cardan gives his impressions of musicians:—"Unde nostra ætate neminem
ferine musicum invenias, qui non omni redundat vitiorum genere. Itaque
hujusmodi musica maximo impedimento non solum pauperi et negotioso viro
est, sed etiam omnibus generaliter. Quin etiam virorum egregiorum nostræ ætatis
neminem musicum agnovimus, Erasmum, Alciatum, Budæum, Jasonem,
Vesalium, Gesnerum. At vero quod domum everterit meam, si dicam, vera
fatebor meo more. Nam et pecuniæ non levem jacturam feci, et quod majus est,
filiorum mores corrupi. Sunt enim plerique ebrii, gulosi, procaces, inconstantes,
impatientes, stolidi, inertes, omnisque libidinis genere coinquinati. Optimi
quique inter illos stulti sunt."—De Utilitate, p. 362.
[179] De Vita Propria, ch. xiii. p. 45.
[180] "Quid profuit hæc tua industria, quis infelicior in filiis? quorum alter male
periit: alter nec regi potest nec regere?"—Opera, tom. i. p. 109.
[181] Opera, tom. i. p. 614.
[182] "In cæteris erit elegans, splendidus, humanus, gravis et qui ab omnibus,
potentioribusque, præsertim probetur."—Geniturarum Exempla, p. 464.
[183] "A scorto nuntius venit."—De Utilitate, p. 833.
[184] This incident is taken from the De Utilitate, which was written soon after
the events chronicled. The account given in the De Vita Propria, written twenty
years later, differs in some details. "Venio domum, accurrit famulus admodum
tristis, nunciat Johannem Baptistam duxisse uxorem Brandoniam Seronam."—
De Vita Propria, ch. xli. p. 147.
[185] Cardan in describing this action of Gian Battista, who was then determined
to murder his wife, says of him: "Erat enim natura clemens admodum et
gratus."—De Utilitate, p. 834.
[186] "Triduana illa disceptatio Papiæ cum Camutio instituta, publicata apud
Senatum: ipse primo argumento primæ diei siluit."—De Vita Propria, ch. xii. p.
37. This does not exactly tally with Camutio's version. With regard to Cardan's
assertion that his colleagues hesitated to meet him in medical discussion it may
be noted that Camutio printed a book at Pavia in 1563, with the following title:
"Andrææ Camutii disputationes quibus Hieronymi Cardani magni nominis viri
conclusiones infirmantur, Galenus ab ejusdem injuria vindicatur, Hippocratis
præterea aliquot loca diligentius multo quam unquam alias explicantur." In his
version (De Vita Propria, ch. xii. p. 37) Cardan inquires sarcastically: "Habentur
ejusdem imagines quædam typis excusæ in Camutii monumentis."
[187] De Vita Propria, ch. xii. p. 39. The Third Book of the Theonoston (Opera,
tom. ii. p. 403) is in the form of a disputation, "De animi immortalite," with this
same Branda.
[188] In his defence at the trial Cardan affirmed that, while Brandonia was lying
sick from eating the cake, her mother and the nurse quarrelled and fought, and
finally fell down upon the sick woman. When the fight was over Brandonia was

dead. In Opera, tom. ii. p. 311 (Theonoston, lib. i.) he writes: "Obiit illa non
veneno, sed vi morbi atque Fato quo tam inclytus juvenis morte sua, omnia
turbare debuerat."
[189] "Vocatus sum enim ad Ducem Suessanum ex Ticinensi Academia
accepique C. aureos coronatos et dona ex serico."—De Vita Propria, ch. xl. p.
138.
[190] De Vita Propria, ch. xli. p. 153.
[191] Opera, tom. i. p. 671. He cites the names of former Governors of Milan
and other patrons, many of them harsh men, and not one as kind and beneficent
as the Duca di Sessa; to wit Antonio Leva, Cardinal Caracio, Alfonso d'Avalos,
Ferrante Gonzaga, the Cardinal of Trent, and the Duca d'Alba. Yet the rule of his
best friend brought him his worst misfortune.
[192] There is a full account of the trial in an appendix to the De Utilitate ex
Adversis Capienda (Basel, 1561). It is not included in the edition hitherto cited.
[193] Laudabatur ejus benignitas ac simul factum Io. Petri Solarii tabellionis, qui
cum filium spurium convictum haberet de veneficio, in duas sorores legitimas,
solum hæreditatis consequendæ causa, satis habuit damnasse illum ad
triremes."—De Vita Propria, ch. x. p. 33.
[194] "Evasit nuper ob constantiam in tormentis famulus filii mei, qui pretio
venenum dederat dominæ sine causa: periit filius meus, qui nec jusserat dari."—
De Utilitate, p. 339.
[195] Gian Battista seems to have boasted about the family wealth, and thus
stirred up the Seroni to demand an excessive and impossible sum. "Hæc et alia
hujusmodi cum protulissem, non valere, nisi eousque, ut decretum sit, si
impetrare pacem potuissem vitæ parceretur. Sed non potuit filii stultitia, qui dum
jactat opes quæ non sunt, illi quod non erat exigunt."—De Vita Propria, ch. x. p.
34.
[196] De Vita Propria, ch. x. p. 33.

CHAPTER X
Cardan had risen to high and well-deserved fame, and this fact alone might
account for the existence of jealousy and ill-feeling amongst certain of
those whom he had passed in the race. Some men, it is true, rise to
eminence without making more than a few enemies, but Cardan was not
one of these. His foes must have been numerous and truculent, the assault
they delivered must have been deadly and overwhelming to have brought to
such piteous wreck fortunes which seemed to rest upon the solid ground of
desert. The public voice might accuse him of folly, but assuredly not of
crime; he was the victim and not the culprit; his skill as a physician was as
great as ever, but these considerations weighed little with the hounds who
were close upon his traces. Now that the tide of his fortune seemed to be on
the ebb they gathered around him. He writes: "And this, in sooth, was the
chief, the culminating misfortune of my life: forasmuch as I could not with
any show of decency be kept in my office, nor could I be dismissed without
some more valid excuse, I could neither continue to reside in Milan with
safety, nor could I depart therefrom. As I walked about the city men looked
askance at me; and whenever I might be forced to exchange words with any
one, I felt that I was a disgraced man. Thus, being conscious that my
company was unacceptable, I shunned my friends. I had no notion what I
should do, or whither I should go. I cannot say whether I was more
wretched in myself than I was odious to my fellows."[197]
Cardan gathered a certain amount of consolation from meditating over the
ills which befell all those who were concerned in Gian Battista's fate. The
Senator Falcutius, a man of the highest character in other respects, died
about four months later, exclaiming with his dying breath that he was
undone through the brutal ignorance of a certain man, who had been eager
for the death sentence. One Hala shortly afterwards followed Falcutius to
the grave, having fallen sick with phthisis immediately after the trial.
Rigone, the President of the Court, lost his wife, and gave her burial bereft
of the usual decencies of the last rite, a thing which Cardan says he could
not have believed, had he not been assured of the same by the testimony of
many witnesses. It was reported too, that Rigone himself, though a man of

good reputation, was forced to feign death in order to escape accusation on
some charge or other. His only son had died shortly before, so it might be
said with reason that his house was as it were thrown under an evil spell by
the avenging Furies of the youth whom he had sent to die in a dungeon.
Again, within a few days the prosecutor himself, Evangelista Seroni, the
man who was the direct cause of his son-in-law's death, was thrown into
prison, and, having been deprived of his office of debt collector, became a
beggar. Moreover, the son whom he specially loved was condemned to
death in Sicily, and died on the gallows. Public and private calamity fell
upon the Duca di Sessa,[198] the Governor of Milan, doubtless because he
had allowed the law to take its course. Indeed every person great or small
who had been concerned in Gian Battista's condemnation, was, by Cardan's
showing, overtaken by grave misfortune.
Cardan still held his Professorship at Pavia, and in spite of the difficulties
and embarrassments of his position he went back to resume his work of
teaching a few days after the fatal issue of his son's trial and condemnation.
By the pathetic simplicity of its diction the following extract gives a vivid
and piteous picture of the utter desolation and misery into which he was
cast: it shows likewise that, after a lapse of fifteen years, the memory of his
shame and sorrow was yet green, and that a powerful stimulus had been
given to his superstitious fancies by the events lately chronicled. "In the
month of May, in the year MDLX, a time when sleep had refused to come
to me because of my grief for my son's death: when I could get no relief
from fasting nor from the flagellation I inflicted upon my legs when I rode
abroad, nor from the game of chess which I then played with Ercole
Visconti, a youth very dear to me, and like myself troubled with
sleeplessness, I prayed God to have pity upon me, because I felt that I must
needs die, or lose my wits, or at least give up my work as Professor, unless I
got some sleep, and that soon. Were I to resign my office, I could find no
other means of earning my bread: if I should go mad I must become a
laughing-stock to all. I must in any case lavish what still remained of my
patrimony, for at my advanced age I could not hope to find fresh
employment. Therefore I besought God that He would send me death,
which is the lot of all men. I went to bed: it was already late, and, as I must
needs rise at four in the morning, I should not have more than two hours'
rest. Sleep, however, fell upon me at once, and meseemed that I heard a

voice speaking to me out of the darkness. I could discern naught, so it was
impossible to say what voice it was, or who was the speaker. It said, 'What
would you have?' or 'What are you grieving over?' and added, 'Is it that you
mourn for your son's death?' I replied, 'Can you doubt this?' Then the voice
answered, 'Take the stone which is hanging round your neck and place it to
your mouth, and so long as you hold it there you will not be troubled with
thoughts of your son.' Here I awoke, and at once asked myself what this
beryl stone could have to do with sleep, but after a little, when I found no
other means of escape from my trouble, I called to mind the words spoken
of a certain man: 'He hoped even beyond hope, and it was accounted to him
as righteousness' (spoken of Abraham), and put the stone in my mouth,
whereupon a thing beyond belief came to pass. In a moment all
remembrance of my son faded from my mind, and the same thing happened
when I fell asleep a second time after being aroused."[199]
The record of Cardan's life for the next two years is a meagre one. His rest
was constantly disturbed either by the machinations of his foes or by the
dread thereof, the evil last-named being probably the more noxious of the
two. As long ago as 1557 he had begun the treatise De Utilitate ex Adversis
Capienda, a work giving evidence of careful construction, and one which,
as a literary performance, takes the first rank.[200] This book had been put
aside, either through pressure of other work or family troubles, but now the
circumstances in which he found himself seemed perfectly congenial for the
elaboration of a subject of this nature, so he set to work to finish it,
concluding with the chapter De Luctu, which has been used largely as the
authority for the foregoing narrative of Gian Battista's crime and death. At
this period, when his mind was fully stored and his faculties adequately
disciplined for the production of the best work, he seems to have realized
with sharp regret that the time before him was so short, and that whatever
fresh fruit of knowledge he might put forth would prove of very slight profit
to him, as author. Writing of his replies given to certain mathematical
professors, who had sent him problems for solution, he remarks that,
although he may have a happy knack of dispatching with rapidity any work
begun, he always begins too late. In his fifty-eighth year he answered one of
these queries, involving three very difficult problems, within seven days; a
feat which he judges to be a marvel: but what profit will it bring him now?
If he had written this treatise when he was thirty he would straightway have

risen to fame and fortune, in spite of his poverty, his rivals, and his enemies.
Then, in ten years' space, he would have finished and brought out all those
books which were now lying unfinished around him in his old age; and
moreover would have won so great gain and glory, that no farther good
fortune would have remained for him to ask for. Another work which he
had begun about the same time (1558) was the treatise on Dialectic,
illustrated by geometrical problems and theorems, and likewise by the well-
known logical catch lines Barbara Celarent. During the summer vacation
of 1561 he returned to Milan, and began a Commentary on the Anatomy of
Mundinus, the recognized text-book of the schools up to the appearance of
Vesalius. In the preface to this work he puts forward a vigorous plea for the
extended use of anatomy in reaching a diagnosis.[201] He had likewise on
hand the Theonoston, a set of essays on Moral subjects written something in
the spirit of Seneca; and, after Gian Battista's death, he wrote the dialogue
Tetim, seu de Humanis Consiliis. In the year following, 1561, a farther
sorrow and trouble came upon him by the death of the English youth,
William. If he was guilty of neglect in the case of this young man—and by
his own confession he was—he was certainly profoundly grieved at his
death. In the Argument to the Dialogus de Morte he laments that he ever let
the youth leave his house without sending him back to England, and tells
how he was cozened by Daldo, the crafty tailor, out of a premium of thirty-
one gold crowns, in return for which William was to be taught a trade. "But
during the summer, Daldo, who had a little farm in the country, took the
youth there and let him join in the village games, and by degrees made him
into a vinedresser. But if at any time it chanced that William's services were
also wanted at the tailor's shop, his master would force him to return thereto
in the evening (for the farm was two miles distant), and sit sewing all the
night. Besides this the boy would go dancing with the villagers, and in the
course of their merry-making he fell in love with a girl. While I was living
at Milan he was taken with fever, and came to me; but, for various reasons,
I did not give proper attention to him, first, because he himself made light
of his ailment; second, because I knew not that his sickness had been
brought on by excessive toil and exposure to the sun; and third, because,
when he had been seized with a similar distemper on two or three occasions
before this, he had always got well within four or five days. Besides this I
was then in trouble owing to the running away of my son Aldo and one of
my servants. What more is there to tell? Four days after I had ordered him

to be bled, messengers came to me in the night and begged me to go and see
him, for he was apparently near his end. He was seized with convulsions
and lost his senses, but I battled with the disease and brought him round. I
was obliged to return to Pavia to resume my teaching, and William, when
he was well enough to get up, was forced to sleep in the workshop by his
master, who had been bidden to a wedding. There he suffered so much from
cold and bad food that, when he was setting out for Pavia to seek me, he
was again taken ill. His unfeeling master caused him to be removed to the
poor-house, and there he died the following morning from the violence of
the distemper, from agony of mind, and from the cold he had suffered.
Indeed I was so heavily stricken by mischance that meseemed I had lost
another son."
It was partly as a consolation in his own grief, and partly as a monument to
the ill-fated youth, that Cardan wrote the Dialogus de Morte, a work which
contains little of interest beyond the record of Cardan's impressions of
Englishmen already quoted. But it was beyond hope that he should find
adequate solace for the gnawing grief and remorse which oppressed him in
this, or any other literary work. He was ill looked upon at Milan, but his
position at Pavia seems to have been still more irksome. He grew nervous
as to his standing as a physician, for, with the powerful prejudice which had
been raised against him both as to his public and his private affairs, he felt
that a single slip in his treatment of any particular case would be fatal to
him. In Milan he did meet with a certain amount of gratitude from the
wealthier citizens for the services he had wrought them; but in Pavia, his
birthplace, the public mind was strongly set against him; indeed in 1562 he
was subjected to so much petty persecution at the hands of the authorities
and of his colleagues, that he determined to give up his Professorship at all
cost. He describes at great length one of the most notable intrigues against
him. "Now in dealing with the deadly snares woven against my life, I will
tell you of something strange which befell me. During my Professorship at
Pavia I was in the habit of reading in my own house. I had in my household
at that time a woman to do occasional work, the youth Ercole Visconti, two
boys, and another servant. Of the two boys, one was my amanuensis and
well skilled in music, and the other was a lackey. It was in 1562 that I made
up my mind to resign my office of teaching and quit Pavia, a resolution
which the Senate took in ill part, and dealt with me as with a man

transported with rage. But there were two doctors of the city who strove
with all their might to drive me away: one a crafty fellow who had formerly
been a pupil of mine; the other was the teacher extraordinary in Medicine, a
simple-minded man, and, as I take it, not evil by nature; but covetous and
ambitious men will stop at nothing, especially when the prize to be won is
an office held in high esteem. Thus, when they despaired of getting rid of
me through the action of the Senate—what though I was petitioning to be
relieved of my duties—they laid a plot to kill me, not by the dagger for fear
of the Senate and of possible scandal, but by malignant craft. My opponent
perceived that he could not be promoted to the post of principal teacher
unless I should leave the place, and for this reason he and his allies spread
their nets from a distance. In the first place, they caused to be written to me,
in the name of my son-in-law[202] and of my daughter as well, a most vile
and filthy letter telling how they were ashamed of their kinship with me;
that they were ashamed likewise for the sake of the Senate, and of the
College; and that the authorities ought to take cognizance of the matter and
pronounce me unworthy of the office of teacher and cause me to be
removed therefrom forthwith. Confounded at receiving such an impudent
and audacious reproof at the hands of my own kindred, I knew not what to
do or say, or what reply I should make; nor could I divine for what reason
this unseemly and grievous affront had been put upon me. It afterwards
came to light that the letter was written in order to serve as an occasion for
fresh attacks; for, before many days had passed, another letter came to me
bearing the name of one Fioravanti, written in the following strain. This
man was likewise shocked for the sake of the city, the college, and the body
of professors, seeing that a report had been spread abroad that I was guilty
of abominable offences which cannot be named. He would call upon a
number of his friends to take steps to compel me to consider the public
scandal I was causing, and would see that the houses where these offences
were committed should be pointed out. When I read this letter I was as one
stupefied, nor could I believe it was the work of Fioravanti, whom I had
hitherto regarded as a man of seemly carriage and a friend. But this letter
and its purport remained fixed in my mind and prompted me to reply to my
son-in-law; for I believed no longer that he had aught to do with the letter
which professed to come from him; indeed I ought never to have harboured
such a suspicion, seeing that both then and now he has always had the most
kindly care for me; nor has he ever judged ill of me.

"I called for my cloak at once and went to Fioravanti, whom I questioned
about the letter. He admitted that he wrote it, whereupon I was more than
ever astonished, for I was loth to suspect him of crooked dealing, much
more of any premeditated treachery. I began to reason with him, and to
inquire where all these wonderful plans had been concocted, and then he
began to waver, and failed to find an answer. He could only put forward
common report, and the utterances of the Rector of the Gymnasium, as the
source of them."[203]
Cardan goes on to connect the foregoing incident, by reasoning which is not
very clear, with what he maintained to have been a veritable attempt against
his life. "The first act of the tragedy having come to an end, the second
began, and this threw certain light upon the first. My foes made it their
special care that I, whom they held up as a disgrace to my country, to my
family, to the Senate, to the Colleges of Milan and Pavia, to the Council of
Professors, and to the students, should become a member of the Accademia
degli Affidati, a society in which were enrolled divers illustrious
theologians, two Cardinals, and two princes, the Duke of Mantua, and the
Marquis Pescara. When they perceived how loth I was to take this step they
began to threaten. What was I to do, broken down by the cruel fate of my
son, and suffering every possible evil? Finally I agreed, induced by the
promise they made me, that, in the course of a few days, I should be
relieved of my duties as Professor; but I did not then perceive the snare, or
consider how it was that they should now court the fellowship of one
whom, less than fifteen days ago, all ranks of the College had declared to be
a monster not to be tolerated. Alas for faith in heaven, for the barbarity of
men, for the hatred of false friends, for that shamelessness and cruelty more
fell than serpent's bite! What more is there to tell? The first time I entered
the room of the Affidati I saw that a heavy beam had been poised above in
such fashion that it might easily fall and kill whatsoever person might be
passing underneath. Whether this had been done by accident or design I
cannot say. But hereafter I attended as rarely as possible, making excuses
for my absence; and, when I did go, I went when no one looked for me, and
out of season, taking good heed of this trap the while. Wherefore no evil
befell me thereby, either because my foes deemed it unwise to work such
wickedness in public, or because they had not finally agreed to put their
scheme in operation, or because they were plotting some fresh evil against

me. Another attempt was made a few days later, when I was called to the
ailing son of one Piero Trono, a surgeon; they placed high over the door a
leaden weight which might easily be made to fall, pretending that it had
been put there to hold up the curtain. This weight did fall; and, had it struck
me, it would certainly have killed me: how near I was to death, God knows.
Wherefore I began to be suspicious of something I could not define, so
greatly was my mind upset. Then a third attempt was made, which was
evident enough. A few days later, when they were about to sing a new
Mass, the same rascally crew came to me, asking me whether I would lend
them the services of my two singing boys, for my enemies knew well
enough that these boys acted as my cup-bearers, and over and beyond this
they made an agreement with my hired woman that she should give me
poison. They first went to Ercole and tried to persuade him to go to the
function; and he, suspecting nothing, at first promised his help; but when he
heard that his fellow was to go likewise, he began to smell mischief and
said, 'Only one of us knows music.' Then Fioravanti, a blunt fellow, was so
wholly set on getting them out of the house that he said, 'Let us have both
of you, for we know that the other is also a musician; and, though he may
not be one of the best, still he will serve to swell the band of choristers.'
Then Ercole said somewhat vaguely that he would ask his master. He came
to me, having fathomed and laid bare the whole intention of the plot, so
that, if I had not been stark mad and stupid, I might easily have seen
through their design. Fifteen days or so had passed when the same men
once more sought me out and begged me to let them have the two boys to
help them in the performance of a comedy. Then Ercole came to me and
said, 'Now in sooth the riddle is plain to read; they are planning to get all
your people away from your table, so that they may kill you with poison;
nor are they satisfied with plotting your death merely by tricks of this sort;
they are determined to kill you by any chance which may offer."[204]
How far these plots were real, and how far they sprang from monomania it
is impossible to say. Cardan's relations with his brother physicians had
never been of the happiest, and it is quite possible that a set may have been
made in the Pavian Academy to get rid of a colleague, difficult to live with
at the best, and now cankered still more in temper by misfortune, and
likewise, in a measure, disgraced by the same. Surrounded by annoyances
such as these, and tormented by the intolerable memories and associations

of the last few years, it is not wonderful that he should seek a way out of his
troubles by a change of scene and occupation.
As early as 1536 Cardan had had professional relations with certain
members of the Borromeo family, which was one of the most illustrious in
Milan, and in 1560 Carlo Borromeo was appointed Archbishop of Milan.
There is no record of the date when Cardan first made acquaintance with
this generous patron, who was the nephew of the reigning Pope, Pius IV.,
himself a Milanese, but it is certain that Cardan had at an earlier date
successfully treated the mother of the future Cardinal,[205] wherefore it is
legitimate to assume that the physician was persona grata to the whole
family. As soon as Cardan had determined to withdraw from Pavia he
applied to the Cardinal, who had just made a magnificent benefaction to
Bologna in the form of the University buildings. He espoused Cardan's
interests at once, and most opportunely, for the protection of a powerful
personage was almost as needful at Bologna, as the sequel shows, as it
would have been at Pavia. It was evident that Cardan had foes elsewhere
than in Pavia; indeed the early stages of the negotiation, which went on in
reference to his transfer to Bologna, suggest a doubt whether the change
would bring him any advantage other than the substitution of one set of
enemies for another. He writes: "When I was about to be summoned to
teach at Bologna, some persons of that place who were envious of my
reputation sent a certain officer (a getter-up of petitions) to Pavia. Now this
fellow, who never once entered the class-room, nor had a word with any
one of my pupils, wrote, on what authority I know not, a report in these
words: 'Concerning Girolamo Cardano, I am told that he taught in this
place, but got no pupils, always lecturing to empty benches: that he is a man
of evil life, ill regarded by all, and little less than a fool, repulsive in his
manners, and entirely unskilled in medicine. After he had promulgated
certain of his opinions he found no one in the city who would employ him,
nor did he practise his art.'
"These words were read to the Senate by the messenger on his return in the
presence of the illustrious Borromeo, the Pope's Legate to the city. The
Senate were upon the point of breaking off all further negotiations, but
while the man was reading his report, some one present heard the words in
which he declared that I did not practise medicine. 'Hui!' he cried, 'I know
that is not true, for I myself have seen divers men of the highest

consideration going to him for help, and I—though I am not to be ranked
with them—have often consulted him myself.' Then the Legate took up the
parole and said, 'I too bear witness that he cured my own mother when she
was given up by every one else.' Then the first speaker suggested that
probably the rest of the tale was just as worthy of belief as this one
statement, the Legate agreeing thereto; whereupon the messenger aforesaid
held his tongue and blushed for shame. Ultimately the Senate determined to
appoint me Professor for one year, 'for,' they said, 'if he should prove to be
the sort of man the officer describes, or if his teaching should profit us
nothing, we can let him go; but if it be otherwise, the contract may be
ratified.' With regard to the salary, over which a dispute had already arisen,
the Legate gave his consent, and the business came to an end.
"But, disregarding this settlement, my opponents urged one of their number
to wait upon me as a delegate from the Senate, and this man would fain
have added to the terms already sanctioned by the Senate, others which I
could not possibly accept. He offered me a smaller stipend, no teaching
room was assigned to me, and no allowance for travelling expenses. I
refused to treat with him, whereupon he was forced to depart, and to return
to me later on with the terms of my engagement duly set forth."[206]
It was in June 1562 that Cardan finally resigned his position at Pavia, but it
was not until some months after this date that the final agreement with the
Bolognese Senate, lately referred to, was concluded, and in the interim he
was forced to suffer no slight annoyance and persecution at the hands of his
adversaries in Pavia, in Bologna, and in Milan as well. Just before he
resigned his Professorship he was warned by the portentous kindling of a
fire, seemingly dead,[207] that fresh mischief was afoot, and he at once
determined in his mind that his foes had planned destruction against him
afresh. So impressed was he at this manifestation that he swore he would
not leave home on the day following. "But early in the morning there came
to my house four or five of my pupils bidding me to a feast, where all the
chief Professors of the Gymnasium and the Academy proposed to be
present. I replied that I could not come, whereupon they, knowing that it
was not my wont to dine in the middle of the day, and deeming that it was
on this score that I refused to join them, said, 'Then for your sake we will
make the feast a supper.' I answered that I could not on any account make
one of their party, and then they demanded to know the cause of my refusal.

I replied it was because of a strange event which had befallen me, and of a
vow I had made thereanent. At this they were greatly astonished, and two of
them exchanged significant glances, and they urged me again and again that
I should not be so firmly set upon marring so illustrious a gathering by my
absence, but I gave back the same answer as before."[208] They came a
second time, but Cardan was not to be moved. He records, however, that he
did break his vow after all by going out after dusk to see a poor butcher
who was seriously ill.
It is hard to detect any evidence of deadly intent in what seems, by
contemporary daylight, to have been a complimentary invitation to dinner;
but to the old man, possessed as he was by hysterical terrors, this episode
undoubtedly foreshadowed another assault against his life. He finds some
compensation, however, in once more recording the fact that all these
disturbers of his peace—like the men who were concerned in Gian Battista's
condemnation—came to a bad end. His rival, who had taken his place as
Professor, had not taught in the schools more than three or four times before
he was seized with disease and died after three months' suffering. "Upon
him there lay only the suspicion of the charge, but I heard afterwards that a
friend of his was certainly privy to the deed of murder which they had
resolved to work upon me by giving me a cup of poisoned wine at the
supper. In the same year died Delfino, and a little while after Fioravanti."
[209]

In July Cardan withdrew to Milan, where, to add to his other troubles, he
was seized with an attack of fever. He was now thoroughly alarmed at the
look of his affairs. Many of his fears may have been imaginary, but the
burden of real trouble which he had to carry was one which might easily
bring him to the ground, and, when once a man is down, the crowd has little
pity or scruple in trampling him to death. He set about to review his
position, and to spy out all possible sources of danger. He writes: "I called
to mind all the books I had written, and, seeing that in them there were
many obscure passages upon which an unfavourable meaning might be put
by the malice of my enemies, I wrote to the Council, submitting all my
writings to its judgment and will and pleasure. By this action I saved myself
from grave danger and disgrace in the future."[210] The Council to which
Cardan here refers was probably the Congregation of the Index appointed

by the Council at Trent for the authoritative examination of all books before
allowing them to be read by the faithful. Before the close of the Council
(1563) these duties had been handed over to the Pope (Pius IV.), who
published the revised and definite Roman Index in 1564.

FOOTNOTES:
[197] De Vita Propria, ch. xxvii. p. 71.
[198] "Quin etiam dominus ac Princeps alioquin generosus et humanus, cum
ipsum ob invidiam meam et accusatorum multitudinem deseruisset, et ipse
multis modis conflictatus est gravibus morbis, cæde propriæ neptis à conjuge
suo, litibus gravibus: tum etiam subsecuta calamitas publica, Zotophagite insula
amissa, classe regia dissipata."—De Vita Propria, ch. xli. p. 153. The island
alluded to must have been Lotophagites insula, an island near the Syrtes Minor
on the African coast, and the loss of the same probably refers to some disaster
during the Imperialist wars against the Moors.
[199] De Vita Propria, ch. xliii. p. 160.
[200] Cardan rates it as his best work on an ethical subject.—Opera, tom i. p.
146. And on p. 115 he writes: "Utinam contigisset absolvere ante errorem filii;
neque enim ille errasset, nec errandi causam aliquam habuisset: nec, etiamsi
errasset, periisset." He also quotes a letter full of sound and loving counsels
which he had sent to Gian Battista six months before he fell into the snare.
[201] Opera, tom. x. p. 129.
[202] Bartolomeo Sacco was evidently living at Pavia at this date.
[203] De Vita Propria, ch. xxx. p. 83.
[204] De Vita Propria, ch. xxx. p. 86.
[205] De Vita Propria, ch. xvii. p. 55.
[206] De Vita Propria, ch. xvii. p. 54.
[207] Ibid., ch. xxx. p. 88. There is also a long account of this occurrence in
Opera, tom. x. p. 459.
[208] De Vita Propria, ch. xxx. p. 89.
[209] De Vita Propria, ch. xxx. p. 90.
[210] Opera, tom. x. p. 460.

CHAPTER XI
While Cardan was lying sick at Milan, a messenger came from Pavia,
begging him to hasten thither to see his infant grandson, who had been
ailing when he left Pavia, and was now much worse. The journey under the
burning sun of the hottest summer known for many years aggravated his
malady, but he brought the child out of danger. He caught erysipelas in the
face, and to this ailment succeeded severe trouble with the teeth. If it had
not been for the fact that the time of the new moon had been near, he says
that he must have submitted to blood-letting; but after the new moon his
health mended, and thus he escaped the two-fold danger—that of the
disease, and that of the lancet. He tells of an attempt made against his life
by a servant for the sake of robbery, an attempt which came very near
success; and of a severe attack of gout in the knee. After a month's
confinement to his house he began to practise Medicine; and, finding
patients in plenty, he nourished a hope that Fortune had done her worst, and
that he might be allowed to repair his shattered fortunes by the exercise of
his calling, but the activity of his adversaries—which may or may not have
been provoked solely by malignity—was unsleeping. He hints at further
attempts against his good name and his life, and gives at length some
painful details of another charge made against him of an infamous
character. It is almost certain that his way was made all the harder for him
from the complaints which he had put in print about the indifference of the
Duca di Sessa to his interests at the time of Gian Battista's trial. The
Milanese doctors had no love for him, and every petulant word he might let
fall would almost surely be brought to the Governor's ears. By Cardan's
own admission it appears that utterances of this sort were both frequent and
acrid. There was a certain physician of the city who wished to place his son
gratis in Cardan's household. Cardan, however, refused, whereupon the
physician in question called attention to a certain book in which Cardan had
made some remarks to the effect that the friendship of the Duca di Sessa
had been a fatal one to him, inasmuch as, having trusted too entirely to this
friendship for his support, he had let go other interests which might have
served him better. The physician aforesaid made a second application to

Cardan to receive his son, offering this time to intercede with the Governor
on his behalf. This proposition roused the old man's anger, and he
exclaimed that he had no need of such friendship or protection; that in fact
the interruption of their good understanding had come about more by his
own act than the Governor's, who had been either unable or unwilling to
save Gian Battista's life. The doctor replied, in the presence of divers
persons, that Gian Battista had perished through his own foolishness: if he
had not confessed he would never have been condemned; that the Senate
had condemned him and not the Duca di Sessa, and that Cardan was now
slandering this prince most unjustly. A lot of busy-bodies had by this time
been attracted by the wrangle, and these heard the doctor's accusations in
full, but gathered a very imperfect notion of Cardan's reply. He indignantly
denied this charge, and in his own account of the scene he affirms that he
won the approbation of all who listened, by the moderation of his bearing
and speech.
Four days after this occurrence he again met this physician, who declared
he knew for certain that a kinsman of the Duca di Sessa, a hot-tempered
man, had just read some slanders written by Cardan about the Duke, and
had declared he would cut the writer in half and throw his remains into the
jakes; the physician went on to say that he had appeased this gentleman's
resentment, and that Cardan had now no cause for fear. Cardan at once saw
through the dishonesty of the fellow, who was not content with bringing
forward an unjust accusation, but must likewise subject him to these
calumnies and the consequent dangers. After a bout of wrangling, in which
the physician sought vainly to win from him an acknowledgment of the
service he had wrought, the malicious fellow shouted out to the crowd
which had gathered around them that Cardan persisted in his infamous
slanders against the Governor. Wanton as the charge was, Cardan felt that
with his present unpopularity it might easily grow into a fatal danger. Might
was right in Milan as far as he was concerned, but he determined that he
must make a stand against this pestilent fellow. By good luck he met some
friends, to whom he told the adventure; and while he was speaking, the
gentleman who was said to have threatened him, and the slanderous
physician as well, joined the gathering; whereupon one of Cardan's friends
repeated the whole story to the gentleman; who, as he was quite unversed in
letters, was hugely diverted at hearing himself set down as a student, and

told the physician that he was a fool, thereby delivering Cardan at least
from this annoyance.
He had refused the terms which the party opposed to him in the Senate at
Bologna had sent for his acceptance, and was still waiting to hear whether
they would carry out their original propositions. It was during this time of
suspense that he was subjected to strange and inexplicable treatment at the
hands of the Milanese Senate, treatment which, viewed by the light of his
own report—the only one extant—seems very harsh and unjust. He writes:
"At the time when I was greatly angered by the action of the Bolognese
agent, four of the Senators persuaded me to seek practice once more in
Milan, wherefore I, having altered my plans, began to try to earn an honest
living, for I reckoned that the Senate of Milan knew that I had rejected the
offers from Bologna, since these offers were unjust in themselves, and put
before me in unjust fashion. But afterwards, although the same iniquitous
terms were offered to me, I accepted them, not indeed because I was
satisfied therewith, but because of my necessity, and so that I might be free
from those dangers which, as I have before stated, pressed upon me in those
days. The reason why I took this step was that the Senate, by most
unexpected action, removed my name from the lists of those licensed to
teach; nor was this all. They warned me by a message that they had recently
given hearing to a double charge against me of very grave offences, and that
nothing but my position, and the interests of the College, kept them back
from laying me in hold. Nevertheless, influenced by these considerations,
they had been moved to reduce my punishment to that of exile. But neither
my good fortune nor God deserted me; for on the same day certain things
came to pass by means of which I was able, with a single word, to free
myself from all suspicion upon either charge, and to prove my innocence.
Moreover, I forced them to admit that no mention of this affair had ever
been made before the Senate, although two graduates had informed me that
it had been discussed."[211]
The Senate, however, was reluctant to stultify its late action, and refused to
restore Cardan's name to the list of teachers. But he was put right in the
sight of the world by the sharp censure pronounced by the Senate upon
those busy-bodies who had ventured to speak in its name. Cardan's last days
in Milan were cheered with a brief gleam of good fortune. His foes seem to
have overshot the mark, and to have aroused sympathy for the old man,

who, whatever his faults, was alike an honour to his country and the victim
of fortune singularly cruel. The city took him under its protection, assured
of his innocence as to the widespread charges against him, and pitying his
misfortunes. His friend Borromeo had probably been forwarding his
interests at the Papal Court, for he records that, just at this time, certain
Cardinals and men of weight wrote to him from Rome in kindly and
flattering terms. On November 16, 1562, the messenger from the Senate of
Bologna arrived at Milan, bearing an offer of slightly more liberal terms.
They were not so favourable as Cardan wished for; but, even had they been
worse, he would probably have closed with them. In spite of the benevolent
attitude of his well-wishers in Milan, it irked him to be there; the faces in
the streets, the town gossip, all tended to recall to him the death of his son,
so he departed at once to take up his duties.
At Bologna Cardan went first to live in a hired house in the Via Gombru.
Aldo was nominally a member of his household; but his presence must have
been a plague rather than a comfort to his father, and he took with him
likewise his orphan grandson, the son of Gian Battista and Brandonia,
whom he destined to make his heir on account of Aldo's ill conduct.[212]
This young man seems to have been a hopeless scoundrel from the first.
The ratio in which fathers apportion their affection amongst their offspring
is a very capricious one, and Cardan may have been fully as wide of the
mark in chiding his younger as he was in lauding the talents and virtues of
his elder son. But it is certain that on several occasions the authorities
shared Cardan's view of Aldo's ill behaviour. More than once he alludes to
the young reprobate's shameful conduct, and the intolerable annoyance
caused by the same. Many of the ancient rights of parents over their
children, which might to-day be deemed excessive, were still operative in
the cities of Italy, and Cardan readily invoked the help of them in trying to
work reformation of a sort upon Aldo, whom he caused to be imprisoned
more than once, and finally to be banished.[213] The numerous hitches
which delayed his final call to Bologna were probably due to the fact that a
certain party amongst the teachers there were opposed to his appointment,
and things did not run too smoothly after he had taken up his residence in
his new home. It was not in Cardan's nature, however much he may have
been cowed and broken down by misfortune, to mix with men inimical to
himself without letting them have a taste of his quality. He records one

skirmish which he had with Fracantiano, the Professor of the Practice of
Medicine, a skirmish which, in its details, resembles so closely his
encounter with Branda Porro, at Pavia, some time before, that it suggests a
doubt whether it ever had a separate existence, and was not simply a variant
of the Branda legend. "It happened that he (Fracantiano) was giving an
account of the passage of the gall into the stomach, and was speaking in
Greek before the whole Academy (he was making the while an anatomical
dissection), when I cried out, 'There is an "ου" wanting in that sentence.'
And as he delayed making any correction of his error, and I kept on
repeating my remark in a low voice, the students cried out, 'Let the Codex
be sent for.' Fracantiano sent for it gladly. It was brought at once, and when
he came to read the passage, he found that what I had affirmed was true to a
hair. He spake not another word, being overwhelmed with confusion and
astonishment. Moreover the students, who had almost compelled me to
come to the lecture, were even more impressed by what had happened. But
from that day forth my opponent avoided all meeting with me; nay, he even
gave orders to his servants that they should warn him whenever they might
see me approaching, and thus he contrived that we should never foregather.
One day when he was teaching Anatomy, the students brought me, by a
trick, into the room, whereupon he straightway fled, and having entangled
his feet in his robe, he fell down headlong. This accident caused no little
confusion, and shortly afterwards he left the place, being then a man well
advanced in years."[214]
He had not lived long in Bologna before he was fated to experience another
repetition of one of the untoward episodes of his past life, to wit the fall of a
house. It was not his own house this time, but it was sufficiently near to
induce him to change his abode without delay. Next door to the house he
had hired in the Via Gombru stood a palace belonging to a certain
Gramigna. "The entire house fell, and was ruined in a single night, and
together with the house perished the owner thereof." It was believed that
this man had divers powerful enemies, and, in order that he might secure his
position, he contrived to bring certain of his foes into his house, having first
made a mine of gunpowder under the portico, and set a match thereto. But
for some reason or other the plot miscarried the night when he destined to
carry it out. Gramigna went to see what was amiss, and at that very moment
the mine exploded and brought the house to the ground. After this explosion

Cardan moved to a house in the Galera quarter, belonging to the family of
Ranucci; but he did not find this dwelling perfect, as he was forced to
vacate the rooms which were most to his taste on account of the bad state of
the ceilings, the plaster of which, more than once, fell down upon his head.
In his Paralipomena, "the last fruit off an old tree," which he put together
about this time, there are numerous stories of prodigies and portents; of
doors which would not close, and doors which opened of their own accord;
of rappings on the walls, and of mysterious thunderings and noises during
the night. He tells, at length, the story, already referred to, of the strange
thing which happened to him, on the eve of his departure from Pavia in
1562, while he was awaiting tidings from Rome as to his appointment at
Bologna. "I wore on the index finger of my right hand a selenite stone set in
a ring, and on my left a jacinth, which I never took off my finger, this stone
being large and hexagonal in shape. I took the selenite from my finger and
put it beneath my pillow, for I fancied it kept off sleep, wearing still the
jacinth because it appeared to have the opposite effect. I slept until
midnight, when I awoke and missed the ring from my left hand. I called
Jacopo Antonio, a boy of fifteen years of age who acted as my servant and
slept in a truckle bed, and bade him look for my rings. He found the selenite
at once where I had placed it; but though we both of us sought closely for
the jacinth we could not find it. I was sorrowful to death on account of this
omen, and despair seized upon my soul when I remembered the dire
consequences of similar signs, all of which I had duly noted in my writings.
I could scarcely believe this to be a thing happening in the order of nature.
After a short delay I collected my thoughts, and told the servant to bring a
light from the hearth. He replied that he would rather not do this, that he
was afraid of the darkness, and that the fire was always extinguished in the
evening. I bade him light a candle with the flint, when he told me that we
had neither matches nor tinder nor sulphur. I persisted, and determined that
a light should be got by one means or another, for I knew that, if I should go
to sleep under so dire an omen, I must needs perish. So I ordered him to get
a light as best he could. He went away and raked up the ashes, and found a
bit of coal about the bigness of a cherry all alight, and caught hold of it with
the tongs. At the same time I had little hope of getting a light, but he applied
it to the wick of a lamp and blew thereon. The wick was lighted without any

flame issuing from the live coal, which thing seemed to me a further
marvel."
After a search with the candle the ring was found on the floor under the
middle of the bed, but the marvel was not yet worked out: the ring could not
possibly have got into such a place unless it had been put there by hand. It
could not have rolled there, on account of its shape, nor could it have fallen
from the bed, because the pillow was closely joined to the head of the bed,
round which ran a raised edge with no rift therein. Cardan concludes: "I
know that much may be said over this matter, but nothing, forsooth, which
will convince a man, ever so little inclined to superstition, that there was no
boding sign manifested thereby, foretelling the ruin of my position and
good name. Then, having soothed my mind, albeit I was well-nigh hopeless,
I consoled myself with the belief that God still protected me." After
pondering long and anxiously over the possible significance of this sign he
took a more sanguine view of the future. He next put the jacinth ring on his
finger and bade the boy try to pull it off, but he tried in vain, so well and
closely did the ring fit the finger. From this time forth Cardan laid aside this
ring, after having worn it for many years as a safeguard against lightning,
plague, wakefulness, and palpitation of the heart.[215]
Many other instances of a like character might be given from the
Paralipomena; but the foregoing will suffice to show that the natural
inclination of Cardan's temper towards the marvellous had been aggravated
by his recent troubles. Also the belief that all men's hands were against him
never slumbered, but for this disposition there may well have been some
justification. Scarcely had he settled in Bologna before an intrigue was set
in motion against him. "After the events aforesaid, and after I had gone to
teach in Bologna, my adversaries, by a trick, managed to deprive me of the
use of a class-room, that is to say they allotted to me an hour just about the
time of dinner, or they gave the class-room at the very same hour, or a little
earlier, to another teacher. When I perceived that the authorities were
unwilling to accede to three distinct propositions which I made to them,
namely, that this other teacher should begin his lecture sooner and leave off
sooner: or that he should teach alternately with me: I so far got my own way
at the next election that the other lecturer had to do his teaching elsewhere."
[216]

It would appear that the intrigues, of which Cardan gives so many
instances, must have been the work of certain individuals, jealous of his
fame and perhaps smarting under some caustic speech or downright insult,
rather than of the authorities; the Senate of Bologna showed no hostility to
him, but on the other hand procured for him the privileges of citizenship.
While the negotiations were going on at Bologna for the further regulation
of his position as a teacher, he tells a strange story how, on three or four
different occasions, certain men came to him by night, in the name of the
Senate and of the Judicial officers, and tried to induce him to recommend
that a certain woman, who had been condemned for blasphemy, and for
poisoning or witchcraft as well, should be pardoned, both by the temporal
and spiritual authorities, bringing forward specially the argument that, in the
sight of philosophers, such things as demons and spirits did not exist. They
likewise urged him to procure the release from prison of another woman,
who had not yet been condemned, because a certain sick man had died
under the hands of some other doctors. They brought also a lot of nativities
for him to read, as if he had been a soothsayer, and not a teacher of
medicine, but he would have nothing to say to them.[217]
It is somewhat strange that Cardan should have detected no trace of the
snare of the enemy in this manœuvre. Bearing in mind the character of the
request made, and the fact that Cardan was by no means a persona grata to
the petitioners, it seems highly probable that they might have been more
anxious to draw from Cardan a profession of his disbelief in witchcraft,
than to procure the enlargement of the accused persons whose cause they
had nominally espoused. At this period it was indeed dangerous to be a
wizard, but it was perhaps still more dangerous to pose as an avowed
sceptic of witchcraft. At the end of the fifteenth century the frequency of
executions for sorcery in the north of Italy had provoked a strong outburst
of popular feeling against this wanton bloodshed; but Spina, writing in the
interest of orthodox religion, deplores that disbelief in the powers of Evil
and their manifestations, always recognized by the Church, should have led
men on to profess by their action any doubt as to the truth of witchcraft. But
in spite of the fulminations of men of this sort, from this time onwards the
more enlightened scholars of Europe began to modify their opinions on the
subject of demoniac possession, and of witchcraft in general. The first book
in which the new views were enunciated was the treatise De Præstigiis

Dæmonum, by Johann Wier, a physician of Cleves, published in 1563. The
step in advance taken by this reformer was not a revolutionary one. He
simply denied that witches were willing and conscious instruments of the
malefic powers, asserting that what evil they wrought came about by reason
of the delusions with which the evil spirits infected the persons said to be
possessed. The devil afflicted his victims directly, and then threw the
suspicion of the evil deed upon some old woman. Wier's book was
condemned and denounced by the clergy—he himself was a Protestant—
but the most serious counterblast against it came from the pen of Jean
Bodin, the illustrious French philosopher and jurist. He held up Wier to
execration as an impious blasphemer, and asserted that the welfare of
Christendom must needs suffer great injury through the dissemination of
doctrines so detestable as those set forth in his book.[218]
Seeing that such a spirit was dominant in the minds of men like Bodin, it
will be evident that a charge of impiety or atheism might well follow a
profession of disbelief, or even scepticism, as to the powers of witches or of
evil spirits. A maxim familiar as an utterance of Sir Thomas Browne, "Ubi
tres medici duo athei," was, no doubt, in common use in Cardan's time; and
he, as a doctor, would consequently be ill-looked upon by the champions of
orthodoxy, who would certainly not be conciliated by the fact that he was
the friend of Cardinal Morone. This learned and enlightened prelate had
been imprisoned by the savage and fanatical Paul IV., on a charge of
favouring opinions analogous to Protestantism, but Pius IV., the easy-going
Milanese jurisconsult, turned ecclesiastic, enlarged him by one of the first
acts of his Papacy, and restored him to the charge of the diocese of Modena.
Besides enjoying at Bologna the patronage of princes of the Church like
Borromeo and Morone, Cardan found there an old friend in Ludovico
Ferrari, who was at this time lecturing on mathematics. He also received
into his house a new pupil, a Bolognese youth named Rodolfo Sylvestro,
who was destined hereafter to bring as great credit to his teacher's name in
Medicine as Ferrari had already brought thereto in Mathematics. Rodolfo
proved to be one of the most faithful and devoted of friends; he remained at
Bologna as long as Cardan continued to live there, sharing his master's ill-
fortune, and ultimately accompanied him to Rome in 1571. He gives the
names of two other Bolognese students, Giulio Pozzo and Camillo

Zanolino, but of all his surviving pupils he rates Sylvestro as the most
gifted.
The records of Cardan's life at this period are scant and fragmentary, few
events being chronicled except dreams and portents. In giving an account of
one of these manifestations, which happened in September 1563, he
incidentally lets light upon certain changes and vicissitudes in his own
affairs. He was at this time living in an apartment in the house of the
Ranucci, next door to a half-ruined palace of the Ghislieri. One night he
awoke from sleep, and found that the neck-band of his shirt had become
entangled with the cord by which he kept his precious emerald and a written
charm suspended round his neck. He tried to disentangle the knot, but in
vain, so he left the complication as it was, purposing to unravel it by
daylight. He did not fall asleep; but, after lying quiet for a little, he
determined to attempt once more whether he could undo the knot, when he
found that everything was clear, and the stone under his armpit. "This sign
showed me an unhoped-for solution of certain weighty difficulties, and at
the same time proved, as I have often said elsewhere, that there must have
been present something else unperceived by me. For my affairs were in this
condition: my son-in-law at Milan had the administration of the scant
remains of my property, and I received no rents therefrom for a whole year.
My literary work was lying at the printer's, but it was not printed. Here, at
Bologna, I was forced to lecture without having a fixed hour assigned to
me. A crowd of enemies were intriguing against me. My son Aldo was in
prison, and of little profit to me. But immediately after this portent I learned
that my two chief opponents were either dying or about to retire. The
question of the lecture-room was settled amicably, so that for the next year I
was able to live in quiet. These two matters having come to an issue, I will
next describe what came to pass with regard to the others.

"During the next July (1564), through the help of Francesco Alciati,[219] the
secretary of Pope Pius IV., a man to whom I am indebted for almost every
benefit I have received since 1561, I began to enjoy my own again. On
August 26 I received from the printer my books all printed with the greatest
care, and by reason of the dispatch of this business my income was greatly
increased. The next day my chief opponent resigned his office, and left
vacant a salary of seven hundred gold crowns. The only manifestation of
adverse fortune left to trouble me was the conspiracy of the doctors against

me, but there were already signs that this would disappear before long, and
in sooth it came to an end after the lapse of another year."[220]
During this portion of his life at Bologna, Cardan seems to have lived
comparatively alone, and to have spent his weary leisure in brooding over
his sorrows. He began his long rambling epilogue to the De Libris Propriis,
and, almost on the threshold, pours out his sorrow afresh over Gian
Battista's unhappy fate. After affirming that Death must necessarily come as
a friend to those whose lives are wretched, he begins to speculate whether,
after all, he ought not to rejoice rather than mourn over his son's death.
"Certes he is rid of this miserable life of danger and difficulty, vain,
sorrowful, brief, and inconstant; these times in which the major part of the
good things of the world fall to the trickster's share, and all may be enjoyed
by those who are backed up by wealth or power or favour. Power is good
when it is in the hands of those who use it well, but it is a great evil when
murderers and poisoners are allowed to wield it. To the ill-starred, to the
ungodly, and to the foolish, death is a boon, freeing them from numberless
dangers, from heavy griefs, from fatal troubles, and from infamy; wherefore
in such cases it ought not to be spoken of as something merely good or
indifferent, but rated as the best of fortune. Shall I not declare to God (for
He willed the deed), to myself, and to my surviving family, that my son's
death was a thing to be desired, for God does all justly, wisely, and
lovingly? He lets me stand as an example to show others that a good and
upright man cannot be altogether wretched. I am poor, infirm, and old;
bereaved by a cruel wrong of my best-loved son, a youth of the fairest
promise, and left only with the faintest hope of any ray of future good
fortune, or of seeing my race perpetuated after my death, for my daughter,
who has been nine years married, is barren.
"At one time I was prosperous in every relation of life: in my friendships, in
my children, and in my health. In my youth I seemed to be one raised up to
realize the highest hopes. I was accustomed to all the good things—nay, to
all the luxuries of life. Now I am wretched, despised, with foes swarming
around me; I not only count myself miserable, I feel I am far more
miserable now than I was happy aforetime. Yet I neither lose my wits nor
make any boast, as my actions prove. I do my work as a teacher with my
mind closely set on the matter in question, and for this reason I attract a
large number of hearers. I manage my affairs better than heretofore; and, if

any man shall compare the book which I have lately published with those
which I wrote some time ago, he will not fail to perceive how vastly my
intellect has gained in richness, in vivacity, and in purity."
Though the note of sorrow or even of despair is perceptible in these
sentences, there is no sign that the virile and elastic spirit of the writer is
broken. But there are manifest signs of an increasing tendency towards
mental detachment from the world which had used him so ill. With the
happiest of men the almost certain prospect of extinction at the end of a
dozen years usually tends to foster the growth of a conviction that the world
after all is a poor affair, and that to quit it is no great evil. How strongly
therefore must reflections of a kindred nature have worked upon a man so
cruelly tried as Cardan!

FOOTNOTES:
[211] Opera, tom. x. p. 462.
[212] "Sed filius minor natu adeò malè se gessit, ut malim transire in nepotem ex
primo filio."—De Vita Propria, ch. xxxvi. p. 112.
[213] De Vita Propria, ch. xxvii. p. 71.
[214] De Vita Propria, ch. xii. p. 40.
[215] Opera, tom. x. p. 459.
[216] De Vita Propria, ch. xvii. p. 56.
[217] De Vita Propria, ch. xxiii. p. 104.
[218] This opinion prevailed with men of learning far into the next century. Sir
Thomas Browne writes: "They that doubt of these, do not only deny them, but
spirits; and are obliquely and upon consequence a sect not of infidels, but
atheists."—Religio Medici, Works, vol. ii. p. 89.
[219] This was the Cardinal, the nephew of Andrea the great jurist, who was also
a good friend of Cardan.
[220] Opera, tom. x. p. 463.

CHAPTER XII
At the beginning of the year 1565 Cardan had a narrow escape from death
by burning, for his bed from some unknown cause caught fire twice in the
same night while he was asleep. The servant was disturbed by the smoke,
and having aroused his master, told him what was amiss, whereupon
Cardan flew into a violent rage, for he deemed that the youth must be
drunk. But he soon perceived the danger, and then they both set to work to
extinguish the flames. His own description of the occurrence is highly
characteristic. "Having put out the fire, I settled myself again to sleep, and,
while I was dreaming of alarms, and that I was flying from some danger, it
happened that either these terrifying dreams, or the fire and smoke again
aroused me, and, looking around, I found that the bed was once more alight,
and the greater part of it consumed. The vari-coloured coverlet, the leather
hangings, and all the covering of the bed was unhurt. Thus this great alarm
and danger and serious disturbance caused only a trifling loss; less than half
of the bed-linen was burnt, but the blankets were entirely consumed. On the
first alarm the flames burnt out twice or thrice with little smoke, and caused
scarcely any damage. The second time the fire and the mishap forced me to
rise just before dawn, the fire lasting altogether about seven hours."

There was naturally a warning sign to be found in this accident.[221] The
smoke, Cardan said, denoted disgrace; the fire, peril and fear; the flame, a
grave and pressing danger to his life. The smouldering fire signified secret
plots which were to be put into execution against him by his servants while
he lay in bed. And the fact that he set fire to the bed himself, denoted that he
would be able to meet any coming danger alone and without assistance. The
indictment against him was foreshadowed by the fire and the flames and the
smoke. Poison and assault were not to be feared. Men might indeed ask
questions as to what kind of danger it could be which only arose from those
about him, and fell short of poison and violence. The fire, he goes on to say,
signifies the Magistrate. More than once it seemed to be extinct, but it
always revived. Danger seemed to threaten him less from open hostility
than from the cunning flattery of foes, and from over-confidence on his own
part. His books, which he had lately caused to be printed, appeared to be in

grave peril, but a graver one overhung his life. He deemed that he would
quit the tribunal condemned by the empty scandal of the crowd, suffering
no slight loss, and worsted chiefly through putting faith in false friends, and
through his own instability. On the whole, the loss would prove
inconsiderable; the danger moderate, but the vexation exceedingly heavy.
These results might have sprung from causes other than natural ones; but,
on the other hand, such things often come about through chance. They
might prove to be a warning to him to keep clear of hostile prejudice, and to
make friends of those in authority, care being taken not to let himself
become involved in their private affairs, and not to seek too close an
acquaintance.[222]
Up to this date, Cardan, when he visited his patients, had either walked or
ridden a mule. In 1562 he began to use a carriage, but this change of habit
brought ill luck with it, for, in this same year, his horses ran away; he was
thrown out of the vehicle, and sustained an injury to one of the fingers of
his right hand, and to the right arm as well.[223] The finger soon healed, but
the damage to the right arm shifted itself over to the left side, leaving the
right arm sound. The foregoing details, taken chiefly from the
Paralipomena (Book III. ch. xii.), are somewhat significant in respect to the
serious trouble which came upon him soon afterwards.
Though he had now secured a class-room for himself, the malice of his
enemies was not yet abated. Just before the end of his term, certain of them
went to Cardinal Morone and told him that it would be inexpedient to allow
Cardan to retain his Professorship any longer, seeing that scarcely any
pupils went to listen to him. The terms Cardan used in describing this
hostile movement against him,[224] rouse a suspicion that there may have
been some ground for the assertion of his adversaries; but he declares that,
at any rate, he had a good many pupils from the beginning of the session up
to the time of Lent. He gives no clue whereby the date of this intrigue may
be exactly ascertained, but it probably happened near the end of his sojourn
at Bologna, because in his account of it he describes likewise the cessation
of his public teaching, and makes no mention of any resumption of the
same. He declares that he was at last overborne by the multitude of his foes,
and their cunning plots. Under the pretence that, in seeking Cardan's
removal, they were really acting for his benefit, they succeeded in bringing

Cardinal Morone round to their views. Cardan's final words in dealing with
this matter help to fix the date of this episode as some time in 1570.
Speaking of his enemies, he writes: "Nay indeed they have given me greater
leisure for the codification of my books, they have lengthened my days,
they have increased my fame, and, by procuring my removal from the work
which was too laborious for me, they secured for me the pleasure I now
enjoy in the discovery and investigation of divers of the secrets of Nature.
Therefore I constantly tell myself that I do not hate these men, nor deem
them blameworthy, because they wrought me an ill turn, but because of the
malignancy they had in their hearts."[225]
It is almost certain that this removal of Cardan from his office of teacher
was part and parcel of a carefully-devised plot against him, and a prelude to
more serious trouble in the near future. Early in April 1570 he had occasion
to put into writing a certain medical opinion which was to be sent to
Cardinal Morone. He describes the episode: "It chanced that one of the
sheets of my manuscript fell from the table down upon the floor, and then
flew by itself up to the cornice of the room, where it hung, fixed to the
woodwork. Greatly amazed, I called for Rodolfo, and pointed out to him
this marvel. He did not indeed see it fly up, and at that time I was ignorant
as to what it might foretell, for I had no foreboding of the many ills which
were about to molest me. But now I see that the meaning of this portent
must have been that, after the approaching shipwreck of my fortunes, my
bark would be sped along with a more favouring breeze. It was during the
month following, unless I am mistaken, that, when I was once more writing
a letter to Cardinal Morone, I looked for a certain powder-box which had
been missing for some long time, and, when I lifted up a sheet of paper in
order to powder it with dust gathered up from the floor of the room, there
was the powder-box, hidden beneath the sheet. How could it have come
there on the level writing-desk? This sign confirmed the hope I had already
conceived of the Cardinal's wisdom and humanity; that he would plead with
the Pope, the best of men, in such wise that I should find a prosperous end
to my toilsome life."[226]
The blow thus foreshadowed fell on October 6, 1570, when he was
suddenly arrested and put under restraint. He speaks of a bond which he
gave for eighteen hundred gold crowns; and says that, while he was in hold,
all his estate was administered by the civil authorities. Rodolfo Sylvestro

was constantly with him during his incarceration, and on January 1, 1571,
he was released, just at nightfall, and allowed to return to his own house.
While he was in prison in the month of October some mysterious knockings
at the door supplied him with a fulfilment and explanation of the portents
lately chronicled. The knockings appeared furthermore to warn him of
approaching death, and he began to bewail his misery; but, having gathered
courage, he heartened himself to face his doom, which could be nothing
worse than death. Young men, leaders of armies, courted death in battle to
win the favour of their sovereigns; wherefore he, a decrepit old man, might
surely await his end with calmness. He then wanders off into a long
disquisition on the philosophy of Polybius, and forgets entirely to set down
further details of his imprisonment, or to explain the cause thereof.
Pius IV. had died at the end of 1565, and had been succeeded by Michele
Ghislieri, the Cardinal of Alessandria, as Pius V. Like his predecessor, the
new Pope was a Milanese by birth, but in character and aims the two Popes
were entirely different. Pius. V. identified himself completely with the work
of the Holy Office, and straightway set in operation all its powers for the
extirpation of the heretical opinions which, on account of the easy-going
character of the late Pope, had made much progress in Italy, and nowhere
more than in Bologna. Von Ranke, in the History of the Popes, gives an
extract (vol. i. p. 97) from the compendium of the Inquisitors, which sets
forth that "Bologna was in a very perilous state, because there the heretics
were especially numerous; amongst them was a certain Gian Battista Rotto,
who enjoyed the friendship and support of many persons of weight, such as
Morone, Pole, and the Marchesa Pescara (Vittoria Colonna). Rotto made
himself very active in collecting money, which he distributed amongst the
poor folk of Bologna who were heretics."
It will be remembered that in 1562, while he was waiting in Milan for the
appointment as Professor at Bologna, Cardan submitted his books to the
Congregation of the Index for approval. He was known to be a fellow-
citizen and friend of the reigning Pope: the corpus of his work had by that
time reached a portentous size, wherefore it is quite possible that the official
readers may have been lenient, or cursory, over their work; but when Pius
V., the strenuous ascetic foe of heresy, stepped into the place of the indolent
Pius IV., jurist and politician rather than Churchman, it is more than
probable that certain amateur inquisitors at Bologna, fully as anxious to

work Cardan's ruin as to safeguard the faith, may have busied themselves in
hunting through his various works for passages upon which to base a charge
of unorthodoxy. Such passages were not hard to find. There was the
horoscope of Jesus Christ, which subsequently affronted the piety of De
Thou. There was the passage already noticed in which he said such hard
things of the Dominicans (De Varietate Rerum, 1557, p. 572). He had
indeed disclaimed it, but there it stood unexpunged in the subsequent
editions of the book; and, while considering this detail, it may be remarked
that Pius V. began his career as a member of the Dominican Order, the
practices of which Cardan had impugned. In the first and second editions of
the De Subtilitate was another passage in which the tenets of Islam and the
circumstances of the birth of Christ were handled in a way which caused
grave scandal and offence.[227] This passage indeed was expunged in the
edition of 1560. The Paralipomena were not in print and available, but what
can be read in them to-day doubtless reflects with accuracy the attitude of
Cardan's mind towards religious matters in 1570. Though the Paralipomena
were locked in his desk, it is almost certain that the spirit with which they
were inspired would have infected Cardan's brain, and prompted him to
repeat in words the views on religion and a future state which he had
already put on paper, for he rarely let discretion interfere with the
enunciation of any opinion he favoured. In the Paralipomena are many
passages written in the spirit of universalism, and treating of the divine
principle as something which animates wise men alone, wise men and
philosophers of every age and every clime, Aristotle being the head and
chief. Plato and Socrates and the Seven Sages adorn this illustrious circle,
which includes likewise the philosophers of Chaldea and Egypt. Opinions
like these were no longer the passport to Papal favour or even toleration.
The age of the humanist Popes was past, and the Puritan movement,
stimulated into life by the active competition of the Reformers, was
beginning to show its strength, so that a man who spoke in terms of respect
or reverence concerning Averroes or Plato would put himself in no light
peril. Thus for those of Cardan's enemies who were minded to search and
listen it must have been an easy task to formulate against him a charge of
heresy, specious enough to carry conviction to such a burning zealot as Pius
V. This Pope, in his new regulations for the maintenance of Church
discipline, requisitioned the services of physicians in the detection of laxity
of religious practices, or of unsoundness. "We forbid," he says in one of his

bulls, "every physician, who may be called to the bedside of a patient, to
visit for more than three days, unless he receives an attestation that the sick
man has made fresh confession of his sins."[228] Cardan, with his irritable
temper, may very likely have treated this regulation as an unwarrantable
interference with his profession, and have paid no attention to it. Again, he
evidently followed Hippocrates in rejecting the supernatural origin of
disease; a position greatly in advance of that held by certain of the leading
physiologists of the time.[229] Thus in more ways than one he may have laid
himself open to some charge of disrespect shown to religion or to the
spiritual powers. The absence of any other specific accusation and the
circumstances of his incarceration, taken in conjunction with the foregoing
considerations, almost compel the conclusion that his arrest and
imprisonment in 1570 were brought about by a charge of impiety whispered
by some envious tongue which will never now be identified. The sanction
given by the authorities of the Church to his writings in 1562, operated
without doubt to mitigate the punishment which fell upon him, and suffered
him, after due purgation of his offences, to enjoy for the residue of his days
a life comparatively quiet and prosperous under the patronage of Pius V.
Though he was let out of prison he was not yet a free man. For some twelve
weeks longer he remained a prisoner in his own house, the bond for
eighteen hundred gold crowns having doubtless been given on this account.
Almost his last reflection about his life at Bologna is one in which he
records his satisfaction that all the men who plotted against him there met
their death soon after their attempt, thus sharing the fate of his enemies at
Milan and Pavia. If he is to be believed in this matter, the Fates, though they
might not shield him from attack, proved themselves to be diligent and
remorseless avengers of his wrongs. At the end of September he turned his
back upon Bologna and the cold hospitality it had given him, and set forth
on his last journey. He travelled by easy stages, and entered Rome on
October 7, 1571, the day upon which Don John of Austria annihilated the
Turkish fleet at Lepanto.
There are evidences in his later writings beyond those already cited, that
Cardan's views on religion had undergone change during his sojourn at
Bologna. It was the custom, even with theologians of the time, to illustrate
freely from the classics, wherefore the spectacle of the names of the great
men of Greek and Roman letters, scattered thickly about the pages of any

book, would not prove or even suggest unorthodoxy. Cardan quotes Plato or
Aristotle or Plotinus twenty times for any saint in the Calendar. He does not
mention the Virgin more than once or twice in the whole of the De Vita
Propria; and, in discoursing on the immortality of the soul, he cites the
opinion of Avicenna, but makes no mention of either saint or father.[230] The
world of classic thought was immeasurably nearer and more real to Cardan
than it can be to any modern dweller beyond the Alps: to him there had
been no solution of continuity between classic times and his own. When he
sat down to write in the Theonoston his meditations on the death of his son,
in the vain hope of reaping consolation therefrom, he invoked the golden
rule of Plotinus, which lays down that the future is foreseen and arranged
by the gods. Being thus arranged, it must needs be just, for God is the
highest expression of justice. Against a fate thus settled for us we have no
right to complain, lest we should seem to be setting ourselves into
opposition to God's will. Here, although he writes in the spirit of a
Christian, the authority cited is that of a heathen philosopher, and the form
of his meditations is taken rather from Seneca than from father or
schoolman. The devotional bias of Cardan's nature seems to have been
strengthened temporarily by the terrible experiences of Gian Battista's trial
and death; but in the course of his residence at Bologna a marked reaction
set in, and the fervent religious outburst, in which he sought consolation
during his intolerable sorrow, was succeeded by a calmer mood which
regarded the necessary evils of life as transitory accidents, and death as the
one and certain end of sorrow, and perhaps of consciousness as well. What
he wrote during his residence in Rome he kept in manuscript; his recent
experience at Bologna warned him that, living under the shadow of the
Vatican with Pius V. as the ruler thereof, it behoved him to walk as an
obedient son of the Church.
Cardan went first to live in the Piazza di San Girolamo, not far from the
Porto del Popolo, but subsequently he lived in a house in the Via Giulia
near the church of Santa Maria di Monserrato, where probably he died. He
had not long been settled in Rome before he was able to add a fresh
supernatural experience to his already overburdened list. In the month of
August 1572 he was lying awake one night with a lamp burning, when
suddenly he heard a loud noise to the right of the chamber, as if a cart laden
with planks was being unloaded. He looked up, and, the door being open at

the time, he perceived a peasant entering the room. Just as he was on the
threshold the intruder uttered the words, "Te sin casa," and straightway
vanished. This apparition puzzled him greatly, and he alludes to it again in
chapter xlvii. of the De Vita Propria. Ultimately he dismisses it with the
remark that the explanation of such phenomena is rather the duty of
theologians than of philosophers.
With regard to matters of religious belief he seems to have taken as a rule of
conduct the remark above written, and left them to the care of professional
experts, for very few of his recorded opinions throw any light upon his
views of the dogmas and doctrines of the Church. Whatever the tenor of
these opinions may have been, he never proclaimed them definitely.
Probably they interested him little, for he was not the man to keep silent
over a subject which he had greatly at heart. He gave a general assent to the
teaching of the Church, taking up the mental attitude of the vast majority of
the learned men of his time, and expected that the Church would do all that
was necessary for him in its own particular province. If he regarded
Erasmus and Luther as disturbers of the faith and heretics, he did not say so,
nor did he censure their activity. (Erasmus he praises highly in the opening
words of the horoscope which he drew for him.—Gen. Ex., p. 496.) But he
had certainly no desire to emulate them or give them his support. The world
of letters and science was wide enough even for his active spirit; the world
lying behind the veil he left to the exploration of those inquirers who might
have a taste for such a venture. Still every page of his life's record shows
how strong was his bent towards the supernatural; but the phase of the
supernatural which he chose for study was one which Churchmen, as a rule,
had let alone. Spirits wandering about this world were of greater moment to
him than spirits fixed in beatitude or bane in the next; and accordingly,
whenever he finds an opportunity, he discourses of apparitions, lamiæ,
incubi, succubi, malignant and beneficent genii, and the methods of
invoking them. Now that old age was pressing heavily upon him and he
began to yearn for support, he sought consolation not in the ecstatic vision
of the fervent Catholic, but in fostering the belief that he was in sooth under
the protection of some guardian spirit like that which had attended his
father and divers of the sages of old. Although he had in his earlier days
treated his father's belief with a certain degree of respect and credence,[231]
there is no evidence that he was possessed with the notion that any such

supernatural guardian attended his own footsteps at the time when he put
together the De Varietate; indeed it would seem that his belief was exactly
the opposite. He writes as follows: "It is first of all necessary to know that
there is one God, the Author of all good, by whose power all things were
made, and in whose name all good things are brought to pass; also, that if a
man shall err he need not be guilty of sin. That there is no other to whom
we owe anything or whom we are bound to worship or serve. If we keep
these sayings with a pure mind we shall be kept pure ourselves and free
from sin. What a demon may be I know not, these beings I neither
recognize nor love. I worship one God, and Him alone I serve. And in truth
these things ought not to be published in the hearing of unlearned folk; for,
if once this belief in spirits be taken up, it may easily come to pass that they
who apply themselves to such arts will attribute God's work to the devil."
[232]
And in another place: "I of a truth know of no spirit or genius which
attends me; but should one come to me, after being warned of the same in
dreams, if it should be given to me by God, I will still reverence God alone;
to Him alone will I give thanks, for any benefit which may befall me, as the
bountiful source and principle of all good. And, in sooth, the spirit may rest
untroubled if I repay my debt to our common Master. I know full well that
He has given to me, for my good genius, reason, patience in trouble, a good
disposition, a disregard of money and dignities, which gifts I use to the full,
and deem them better and greater possessions than the Demon of Socrates."
[233]

About the Demon of Socrates Cardan has much to say in the De Varietate.
He never even hints a doubt as to the veracity and sincerity of Socrates. He
is quite sure that Socrates was fully persuaded of the reality of his attendant
genius, and favours the view that this belief may have been well founded.
He takes an agnostic position,[234] confining his positive statement to an
assertion of his own inability to realize the presence 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 right side? If indeed it had not fared with him thus, after his
son's death, he would at once have passed out of this life, whereby many
and great evils might have come to pass. He was freed also from another
troublesome ailment. In sooth, so many and so mighty are the wonderful
things which had befallen him, that I, who am very intimate with him (and
he himself thinks the same), am constrained to believe that he is attended by
a genius, great and powerful and rare, and that he is not the master of his
own actions. What he would have, he has not; and what he has, he would
not have chosen, or even wished for. This thing causes him much trouble,
but he submits when he reflects that all things are God's handiwork." The

speaker ends by saying that he never heard of any others thus attended, save
this man, and his father before him, and Socrates.[238]
But it is in chapter xlvii. of the De Vita Propria, which must have been
written shortly before his death, that he lets the reader see most plainly how
strong was the hold which this belief in a guardian spirit of his own had
taken upon him. "It is an admitted truth," he writes, "that attendant spirits
have protected certain men, to wit, Socrates, Plotinus, Synesius, Dion,
Flavius Josephus, and myself. All of these have enjoyed prosperous lives
except Socrates and me, and I, as I have said before, was at one time offered
many and favourable opportunities for the achievement of happiness. But
C. Cæsar the dictator, Cicero, Antony, Brutus, and Cassius were also
attended by mighty spirits, albeit malignant. For a long time I have been
persuaded that I too had one, but by what method it gave me intelligence as
to events about to happen, I could not exactly ascertain until I reached the
seventy-fourth year of my age, the season when I began to write this record
of my life. I now perceive that when I was in Milan in 1557, when my
genius perceived what was hanging over me—how that my son on that
same evening had promised to marry Brandonia Seroni, and that he would
complete the nuptials the following day—it produced in me that palpitation
of the heart of which I have already made mention, a weakness known to
my genius alone, a manifestation which served to simulate a trembling of
the bed."
Cardan writes at length to show that the mysterious knocking which he and
Rodolfo Sylvestro had heard during his imprisonment at Bologna, the
peasant who entered his bed-chamber saying "Te sin casa," and divers other
manifestations, going back as far as 1531—croaking of ravens, barking of
dogs, and the ignition of fire-wood—must all have been brought about by
the working of this powerful spirit. In 1570 there happened to him one of
his everyday experiences of the presence of supernatural powers. In the
middle of the night he was conscious of some presence walking about the
room. It sat down beside him, and at the same time a loud noise arose from
a chest which stood near. This phenomenon, he admits, might well have
been the figment of a brain overburdened with thought; but suddenly his
memory flies back to an experience of his twentieth year, upon which he
proceeds to build a story, wild and fanciful even for his powers of
imagination. "What man was it," he asks, "who sold me that copy of

Apuleius when I was in my twentieth year, and forthwith went away? I
indeed, at that time, had made only one essay in the literary arena, and had
no knowledge of the Latin tongue; but in spite of this, and because the book
had a gilded cover, I was imprudent enough to buy it. The very next day I
found myself just as well versed in Latin as I am now. Moreover, almost at
the same time I acquired knowledge of Greek and Spanish and French,
sufficient for reading books written in these languages."
Cardan was by this time completely possessed by the belief in his attendant
genius, and the flash of memory which recalled the purchase of some book
or other in his youth, suggested likewise the attribution of certain mystic
powers to this guardian genius, and conjured up some fanciful explanation
as to the way these powers had been exercised upon himself; he, the person
most closely concerned, being entirely unconscious of their operation at the
time when they first affected him. This recorded belief in a gift of tongues
is one of the most convincing bits of evidence to be gleaned from Cardan's
writings of the insanity which undoubtedly afflicted him, at least
periodically, at this crisis of his life.

FOOTNOTES:
[221] He mentions this matter briefly in the De Vita Propria: "Bis arsisset lectus,
prædixi me non permansurum Bononiæ, et prima vice restiti, secunda non
potui."—ch. xli. p. 151. A fuller account of it is in Opera, tom. x. p. 464.
[222] Opera, tom. x. p. 464.
[223] De Vita Propria, ch. xxx. p. 80. He seems to have had many untoward
experiences in driving. He tells of another mishap (Opera, tom. i. p. 472) in June
1570; how a fellow, some tipstaff of the courts, jumped into his carriage and
frightened the mares Cardan was driving, jeering at them likewise because they
were rather bare of flesh.
[224] "Demum sub conductionis fine, voces sparserunt, et maxime apud
Moronum Cardinalem, me exiguo auditorio profiteri, quod quanquam non
omnino verum esset, quinimo ab initio Academiæ multos, et usque ad dies
jejunii haberem auditores."—De Vita Propria, ch. xvii. p. 56.
[225] De Vita Propria, ch. xvii. p. 57.
[226] De Vita Propria, ch. xliii. p. 163.
[227] "Alii multis diebus abstinent cibo, alii igne uruntur, ac ferro secantur,
nullum doloris vestigium preferentes; multi sunt vocem e pectore mittentes, qui

olim engastrimuthi dicebantur; hoc autem maxime eis contingit cum orgia
quædam exercent, atque circumferuntur in orbem. Quæ tria ut verissima sunt et
naturali ratione mira tamen constant, cujus superius mentionem fecimus, ita illud
confictum nasci pueros e mulieribus absque concubitu."—De Subtilitate, p. 353.
[228] Ranke, History of the Popes, vol. i. p. 246.
[229] Mr. Stephen Paget in his life of Ambroise Paré, the great contemporary
French surgeon, gives an interesting account of Paré's beliefs on the divine cause
of the plague, p. 269.
[230] De Vita Propria, ch. xxii. p. 63.
[231] "Multa de dæmonibus narrabat, quæ quam vera essent nescio."—De
Utilitate, p. 348.
[232] De Varietate, p. 351.
[233] Ibid., p. 658.
[234] In his counsel to his children, he writes: "Do not believe that you hear
demons speak to you, or that you behold the dead. Seek not to learn the truth of
these things, for they are amongst the things which are hidden from us."
[235] Cardan alludes to Niger in De Varietate, p. 641: "Referebat aliquando
Josephus Niger harum rerum maximé peritus, dæmonem pueris se sub forma
Christi ostendisse, petiisseque ut adoraretur."
[236] De Subtilitate, p. 530.
[237] "Nolim ego ad trutinam hæc sectari, velut Porphyrius, Psellus, Plotinus,
Proclus, Jamblicus, qui copiose de his quæ non videre, velut historiam natæ rei
scripserunt."—De Subtilitate, p. 540.
[238] Opera, tom. i. 672.

CHAPTER XIII
After the accusation brought against him at Milan in 1562, Cardan had
been prohibited from teaching or lecturing in that city, and similar
disabilities had followed his recent imprisonment at Bologna. At Rome no
duties of this kind awaited him, so he had full time to follow his physician's
calling after taking up his residence there. He records the cure of a noble
matron, Clementina Massa, and of Cesare Buontempo, a jurisconsult, both
of whom had been suffering for nearly two years. The circumstances of his
retirement from Bologna would not affect his reputation as a physician, and
he seems to have had in Rome as many or even more patients than he cared
to treat; and in writing in general terms concerning his successes as a healer,
he says: "In all, I restored to health more than a hundred patients, given up
as incurable in Milan, in Bologna, and in Rome." Of all the friends Cardan
had in this closing period of his life, none was more useful or benevolent
than Cardinal Alciati, who, although he had been secretary to Pius IV.,
contrived to retain the favour of his successor. This piece of good fortune
Alciati owed to the protection of Carlo Borromeo, who had been his pupil
at Pavia, and had procured for him from Pius IV. a bishopric, a cardinal's
hat, and the secretaryship of Dataria. Another of Cardan's powerful friends
was the Prince of Matellica, of whom he speaks in terms of praise inflated
enough to be ridiculous, were it not for the accompanying note of pathos.
After celebrating the almost divine character of this nobleman, his
munificence and his superhuman abilities, he goes on: "What could there be
in me to win the kindly notice of such a patron? Certainly I had done him
no service, nor could he hope I should ever do him any in the future, I, an
old man, an outcast of fortune, and prostrated by calamity. In sooth, there
was naught about me to attract him; if indeed he found any merit in me, it
must have been my uprightness."
Powerful friends are never superfluous, and Cardan seems to have needed
them in Rome as much as in Bologna. In 1573 he again hints at plots
against his life, but almost immediately after recording his suspicions he
goes on to suggest that his danger had arisen chiefly from his ignorance of
the streets of Rome, and from the uncouth manners of the populace. "Many

physicians, more cautious than myself, and better versed in the customs of
the place, have come by their death from similar cause." The danger,
whatever its nature, seems to have threatened him as a member of the
practising faculty at Rome rather than as the persecuted ex-teacher of Pavia
and Bologna. Rodolfo Sylvestro was not the only one of his former
associates near him in his old age, for he notes that Simone Sosia, who had
been his famulus at Pavia in 1562, was still in his service at Rome.
In reviewing the machinations of his enemies to bring about his dismissal
from the Professorship at Bologna, Cardan indulges in the reflection that
these men unwillingly did him good service, that is, they procured him
leisure which he might use in the completion of his unfinished works, and
in the construction of fresh monuments which he proposed to build up out
of the vast store of material accumulated in his industrious brain. The
literary record of his life in Rome shows that this was no vain saying. He
was at work on the later chapters of the De Vita Propria up to the last weeks
of his life; and, scattered about these, there are records of his work of
correction and revising. While telling of the books he has lately been
engaged with, he wanders off in the same sentence to talk of the dream
which urged him to write the De Subtilitate, and of the execution of the
Commentarii in Ptolomæum, during his voyage down the Loire. In 1573 he
seems to have found the mass of undigested work more than he could bear
to behold; for, after making extracts of such matter as he deemed worth
keeping, he consigned to the flames no less than a hundred and twenty of
his manuscripts.[239] Before leaving Bologna he had put into shape the
Proxenata, a lengthy collection of hints, maxims, and reflections as to
everyday life; he had re-edited the Liber Artis Magnæ, and had added
thereto the treatise De Proportionibus, and the Regula Aliza. He also took in
hand two books on Geometry, and one on Music, and this last he completed
in 1574. On November 16, 1574, he records that he is at that moment
writing an explanation of the more abstruse works of Hippocrates, but that
he is yet far from the end of his task.
In the De Libris Propriis he gives a list of all his published works, and
likewise a table of the same arranged in the order in which they ought to be
read. He apologizes for the imperfect state in which some of them are left,
and declares that the sight of his unfinished tasks never fails to awaken in
his breast a bitter sense of resentment over that loss which he had never

ceased to mourn. "At one time I hoped," he writes, "that these works would
be corrected by my son, but this favour you see has been denied to me. The
desire of my enemies was not to make an end of him, but of me; not by
gentle means, in sooth, but by cruel open murder; to let me fall in the very
blood of my son." It is somewhat remarkable that in this matter Cardan was
destined to suffer a disappointment similar to that which he himself brought
upon his own father by refusing to qualify himself to become the
commentator on Archbishop Peckham's Perspectiva. He next gives the
names of all those who had commended him in their works, and finds a
special cause for gratification in the fact that, out of the long list set down,
only four or five were known to him personally, and these not intimately.
There is, however, another short list of censors; and of these he affirms that
a certain Brodeus alone is worthy of respect. Of Buteon, who criticized the
treatise on Arithmetic, he says: "Est plane stultus et elleboro indiget."
Tartaglia's name is there, and he, according to Cardan, was forced to eat his
words; "but he was ashamed to do what he promised, and unwilling to blot
out what he had written. He went on in his wrong-headed course, living
upon the labour of other men like a greedy crow, a manifest robber of other
men's wealth of study; so impudent that he published as his own, in the
Italian tongue, that invention for the raising of sunken ships which I had
made known four years before. This he did, understanding the subject only
imperfectly, and making no mention of my name. But men of real learning
also attacked me: Rondeletius, and Julius Scaliger; and Fuchsius, in the
proem of his book, says that my work Medicinæ Contradictiones should be
avoided like deadly poison. Julius Scaliger has been fully answered in the
Apologia in the Books on Subtlety."[240]
There is a passage from De Thou's History of his Own Times, affixed to all
editions of the De Vita Propria,[241] in which is given a contemporary
sketch of Cardan during his residence at Rome. "His whole life," De Thou
writes, "has been as strange as his present manners, and he, in sooth, out of
singleness of mind or frankness, has written about himself certain
statements, the like of which have never before been heard of a man of
letters, and these I do not feel bound to unfold to any one, let him be ever so
curious. I, myself, happening to be in Rome a few years before his death,
often spoke to him and observed him with astonishment as he took his
walks about the city clad in strange garb. When I considered the many

writings of this famous man, I could perceive in him nothing to justify his
great renown. Wherefore I am all the more inclined to turn to that very
acute criticism of Julius Cæsar Scaliger, who exercised his extraordinary
genius in making a special examination of the treatise De Subtilitate Rerum.
He, having carefully noted everywhere the unequal powers of this writer,
decided that he was one who, in certain subjects, knew more than a man
could know, while in others he seemed more simple than a child. In the
science of Arithmetic he worked hard and made many discoveries; but he
was subject to strange and excessive aberration of mind, and was guilty of
the most impudent blasphemy, in that he was minded to subject to the
artificial laws of the stars the Ruler of the stars Himself, for this thing he
did in the horoscope of our Saviour which he drew."
Another witness of his life in Rome is François d'Amboise, a young French
nobleman, who was engaged on his book De Symbolis Heroicis. He says
that he saw Cardan, who was living in a spacious house, on the walls of
which, in place of elegant paintings or vari-coloured tapestries, were written
the words, "Tempus mea possessio."
In his later writings there are farther indications that he was wont to conjure
up omens and portents chiefly at those times when he was in danger and
mental distress. In the case which is given below, the omen showed itself in
a season of trouble, but Cardan, in describing it later, treats it as if he were a
modern scientist. The distressing memories of the imprisonment had faded,
and writing in ease and security at Rome he begins to rationalize. In the
dialogue between himself and his father, written shortly before his death,
Fazio calls his son's attention to certain of the omens and portents already
noticed; and, after discussing these, Jerome goes on to tell for the first time
of another boding event which, as he affirms, distressed him even more than
the loss of his office and the prohibition to publish his books. On the day of
his incarceration, on two different occasions, he met a cow being driven to
the slaughter-house, with much shouting and beating with sticks and
barking of dogs. The explanation of this event which he puts in Fazio's
mouth is entirely conceived in the spirit of rationalism. What was there to
wonder at? There was a butcher's shop in the street, and animals going to
slaughter would naturally be met there. Why should a man fear to meet a
cow? If it had been a bull there might have been something in it. Then with
regard to the shaking of a window-casement; this might easily have been

occasioned by the flight of a bird.[242] He was certainly less inclined to put
faith in the warnings of the stars and in the lines of his hand. His line of life
was very short and irregular, intersected and bifurcated, while the rest of the
lines were little thicker than hairs. In his horoscope was a certain malefic
influence which threatened that his life would be cut short before his forty-
fifth year. "But," he writes in the year before his death, "here I am, living at
the age of seventy-five."[243] The one supernatural idea which seems to
have deepened with old age and remained undisturbed to the end was his
belief in his attendant genius. In what he wrote during his last years his
mood was almost entirely introspective, contemplative, and didactic, yet
here and there he introduces a sentence which lets in a little light from his
way of life and personal affairs, and helps to show how he occupied
himself, and what his humour was. He tells how one day, in 1576, he was
writing about the fennel plant in his treatise De Tuenda Sanitate, a plant
which he praised highly because it pleased his palate. But shortly
afterwards, when he was walking one day in the Roman vegetable market,
an old man, shabbily dressed, met him and dissuaded him from the use of
the plant aforesaid, saying: "In Galen's opinion you may as readily meet
your death thereby as by eating hemlock." "I answered that I knew well
enough the difference between hemlock and fennel, but the old man said,
'Take care, I know what I am saying,' and went on murmuring something
about Galen. Whereupon I went home and found in Galen a passage I had
not hitherto noticed, and, having changed my former views, I added many
fresh excerpts to my treatise."
Although his faith may have been shaken in the ability of the stars to
govern his own fortunes, he records a case in which he himself filled the
post of vates, and which came to a sudden and terrible issue. Cardan was
present at a supper-party, and in the course of conversation let fall the
remark, "I should like to say something, were I not afraid that my words
would disturb the company," to which one of the guests replied, "You mean
that you would prophesy death to one of us here present." Cardan replied,
"Yes, within the present year," and in the next sentence he tells how on the
first day of December in that same year a certain young man, named
Virgilius, who had been present at the gathering aforesaid, died, and he sets
down this event as a fulfilment of his prophecy.

But in the same chapter he lets the reader into the secret of his system of
prophecy, and displays it as simply an affair of common-sense, one
recommended by Aristotle as the only trustworthy method of divining
future events. Cardan writes: "I used to inquire what might be the exact
nature of the business in hand, and began by making myself acquainted
with the character of the locality, the ways of the people, and the quality of
the chief actors. I unfolded a vast number of historical instances, leading
events and secret transactions as well, and then, when I had confirmed the
facts set forth by my method of art, I gave my judgment thereupon."[244]
In his latter years Cardan must have been in easy circumstances. The
pension from the Pope—no mention is made of its amount—and the fees he
received from his patients allowed him to keep a carriage; and writing in his
seventy-fifth year, he says that no fees would tempt him to join any
consultation unless he should be well assured what sort of men he was
expected to meet.[245]
In the Norma Vitæ Consarcinata[246] he relates how in April 1576 there
were two inmates of the Xenodochium at Rome, Troilus and Dominicus. It
seemed that Troilus exercised some strange and malefic influence over his
companion, who was taken with fever. He got well of this, but only to fall
into a dropsy, which despatched him in a week. Shortly before his death, at
the seventh hour, he cried out to two Spaniards who were standing by the
bed that he had suffered such great torture from the working of Troilus, and
that he was dying therefrom. "Therefore," he cried, "in your presence I
summon him with my dying words to appear before God's tribunal, that he
may give an account of all the evil he has wrought against me." On the
following day there came a messenger from Corneto, a few miles from
Rome, saying that Troilus, who was sojourning there, had fallen sick. The
physician inquired at what hour, and the messenger said it was at seven
o'clock, a day or two ago. He lay ill some days, an unfavourable case, but
not a desperate one, and one night shortly afterwards at seven o'clock, the
top of the mosquito curtains fell, and he died at exactly the same hour as
Dominicus.
He tells another long story of an adventure which befell him in May 1576.
One day he was driving in his carriage in the Forum, when he remembered
that he wanted to see a certain jeweller who lived in a narrow alley close by.

Wherefore he told his coachman, a stupid fellow, to go to the Campo
Altoviti, and await him there. The coachman drove off apparently
understanding the order; but, instead of going to the place designated, went
somewhere else; so Cardan, when he set about to find his carriage, sought
in vain. He had a notion that the man had gone to a spot near the citadel, so
he walked thither, encumbered with the thick garments he had put on as
necessary for riding in the carriage. Just then he met a friend of his,
Vincenzio, a Bolognese musician, who remarked that Cardan was not in his
carriage as usual. The old man went on towards the citadel, but saw nothing
of the carriage; and now he began to be seriously troubled, for there was
naught else to be done but to go back over the bridge, and he was wearied
with long fasting and his heavy clothes. He might indeed have asked for the
loan of a carriage from the Governor of the castle; but he was unwilling to
do this, so having commended himself to God, he resolved to use all his
patience and prudence in finding his way back. He set out, and when he had
crossed the bridge, he entered the banking-house of the Altoviti to inquire
as to the alteration in the rate of exchange on Naples, and there sat down to
rest. While the banker was giving him this information, the Governor
entered the place, whereupon Cardan went out and there he found his
carriage, the driver having been informed by Vincenzio, whom he had met,
of the mistake he had made. Cardan got into the carriage, and while he was
wondering whether or not he had better go home and break his fast, he
found three raisins in his pocket, and thus made a fortunate ending of all his
difficulties.
All this reads like a commonplace chapter of accidents; but the events
recorded did not present themselves to Cardan in this guise. He sits down to
moralize over the succession of momentary events: his meeting with
Vincenzio; Vincenzio's meeting with the driver, and directions given to the
man to drive to the money-changers'; the presence of the Governor, his exit
from the bank, his consequent meeting with the carriage, and his discovery
of the raisins, seven occurrences in all, any one of which, if it had happened
a little sooner or a little later, would have brought about great
inconvenience, or even worse. He does not deny that other men may not
now and then encounter like experiences, but the experiences of other men
were not fraught with such momentous crises, nor did they foreshadow so
many or grave dangers.

The chronicling of this episode and the fanciful coincidence of the deaths of
Dominicus and Troilus may be taken as evidence that his idiosyncrasies
were becoming aggravated by the decay of his faculties. Writing on October
1, 1576, he makes mention of the various testaments he had already made,
and goes on to say that he had resolved to make a new and final disposition
of his goods. He would fain have let his property descend to his immediate
offspring, but with a son like Aldo this was impossible, so he left all to Gian
Battista's son, who would now be a youth about eighteen years of age, Aldo
getting nothing. He desired, for reasons best known to himself, that all his
descendants should remain in curatela as long as possible, and that all his
property should be held on trust; if the issue of his body should fail, then
the succession should pass in perpetuity to his kinsfolk on the father's side.
He desired that his works should be corrected and printed, and that, if heirs
failed entirely, his house at Bologna should pass to the University, and be
styled, after his family, Collegium Cardanorum.
There is no authentic record of the exact date of Cardan's death. De Thou,
in writing the record of 1576, says that if Cardan's life had been prolonged
by three days he would have completed his seventy-fifth year. As Cardan's
birthday was September 24, 1501, this would fix his death on September
21, 1576. The exact figures given by De Thou are: "eodem, quo prædixerat,
anno et die, videlicet XI. Kalend. VIII.," and he adds by way of information
that a belief was current at the time that Cardan, who had foretold how he
would die on this day and in this year, had abstained from food for some
days previous to his death in order to make the fatal day square with the
prophecy.
But the details which Cardan himself has set down concerning the last few
weeks of his life are inconsistent with the facts chronicled by De Thou. In
the De Vita Propria, chapter xxxvi., Cardan records how on October 1,
1576, he set to work to make his last will and testament, wherefore if credit
is to be given to his version rather than to that of De Thou, he was alive and
active some days after the date of his death as fixed by the chronicler. In
cases where the record of an event of his early life given in the De Vita
Propria differs from an account of the same in some contemporary writing,
the testimony of the De Vita Propria may justly be put aside; but in this
instance he was writing of something which could only have happened a
few days past, and the balance of probability is that he was right and De

Thou wrong. Bayle notices this discrepancy, and in the same paragraph
taxes De Thou with a mistake of which he is innocent. He states that De
Thou placed the date of Cardan's death in 1575, whereas the excerpt cited
above runs: "Thuanus ad annum MDLXXVI., p. 136, lib. lxii. tom. 4.
Romæ magni nominis sive Mathematicus, sive Medicus Hieronymus
Cardanus Mediol. natus hoc anno itidem obiit."
No mention is made of the disease to which Cardan finally succumbed. Had
his frame not been of the strongest and most wiry, it must have gone to
pieces long before through the havoc wrought by the severe and continuous
series of ailments with which it was afflicted; so it seems permissible to
assume that he died of natural decay. His body was interred in the church of
Sant Andrea at Rome, and was subsequently transferred to Milan to be
deposited finally under the stone which covered the bones of his father in
the church of San Marco. This tomb, which Jerome had erected after Fazio's
death, bore the following inscription:
FACIO CARDANO

1.C.

Mors fuit id quod vixi: vitam mors dedit ipsa,
Mens æterna manet, gloria tuta quies.

Obiit anno MDXXIV. IV. Kalend. Sept. anno Ætatis LXXX.
Hieronymus Cardanus Medicus Parenti posterisque V.P.[247]

FOOTNOTES:
[239] "Qua causa permotus sim ad scribendum, superius intellexisse te existimo,
quippe somnio monitus, inde bis, terque, ac quater, ac pluries, ut alias testatus
sum; sed et desiderio perpetuandi nominis. Bis autem magnam copiam ac
numerum eorum perdidi; primum circa XXXVII annum, cum circiter IX. libros
exussi, quod vanos ac nullius utilitatis futuros esse intelligerem; anno autem
MDLXXIII alios CXX libros, cum jam calamitas illa cessasset cremavi."—De
Vita Propria, ch. xlv. pp. 174, 175.
[240] Opera, tom. i. p. 122.
[241] De Vita Propria, p. 232.

[242] Opera, tom. i. p. 639. In the De Varietate he says that natural causes may
in most cases be found for seeming marvels. "Ecce auditur strepitus in domo,
potest esse mus, felis, ericius, aut quod tigna subsidant blatta."—p. 624.
[243] De Vita Propria, ch. xli. p. 152.
[244] De Vita Propria, chapter xlii., passim.
[245] Ibid., p. 66.
[246] Opera, tom. i. p. 339.
[247] Tomasinus, Gymnasium Patavinum.

CHAPTER XIV
The estimates hitherto made concerning Cardan's character appear to have
been influenced too completely, one way or the other, by the judgment
pronounced upon him by Gabriel Naudé, and prefixed to all editions of the
De Vita Propria. Some writers have been disposed to treat Naudé as a hide-
bound pedant, insensible to the charm of genius, and the last man who
ought to be trusted as the valuator of a nature so richly gifted, original, and
erratic as was Cardan's. Such critics are content to regard as black anything
which Naudé calls white and vice versâ. Others accept him as a witness
entirely trustworthy, and adopt as a true description of Cardan the
paragraphs made up of uncomplimentary adjectives—applied by Cardan to
himself—which Naudé has transferred from the De Vita Propria and the
Geniturarum Exempla to his Judicium de Cardano.
It may be conceded at once that the impression received from a perusal of
this criticism is in the main an unfavourable one of Cardan as a man,
although Naudé shows himself no niggard of praise when he deals with
Cardan's achievements in Medicine and Mathematics. But in appraising the
qualifications of Naudé to act as a judge in this case, it will be necessary to
bear in mind the fact that he was in his day a leading exponent of liberal
opinions, the author of a treatise exposing the mummeries and sham
mysteries of the Rosicrucians, and of an "Apologie pour les Grands
Hommes soupçonnez de Magie," and a disbeliever in supernatural
manifestations of every kind. With a mind thus attuned it is no matter of
surprise that Naudé should have been led to speak somewhat severely when
called upon to give judgment on a man saturated as Cardan was with the
belief in sorcery, witches, and attendant demons.
If Naudé indeed set to work with the intention of drawing a figure of
Cardan which should stand out a sinister apparition in the eyes of posterity,
his task was an easy one. All he had to do was to place Jerome Cardan
himself in the witness-box. Reference to the passages already quoted will
show that, in the whole corpus of autobiographic literature, there does not
exist a volume in which the work of self-dissection has been so ruthlessly

and completely undertaken and executed as in Cardan's memoirs. It has all
the vices of an old man's book; it is garrulous, vain-glorious, and full of
needless repetition; but, whatever portion of his life may be under
consideration, the author never shrinks from holding up to the world's gaze
the result of his searches in the deepest abysses of his conscience.
Autobiographers, as a rule, do not feel themselves subject to a responsibility
so deep as this. Memory turns back to the contemplation of certain springs
of action, certain achievements in the past, making a judicious selection
from these, and excerpting only such as promise to furnish the possible
reader with a pleasing impression of the personality of the subject. With
material of this sort at hand, the autobiographer sets to work to construct a
fair and gracious monument, being easily persuaded that it would be a
barbarous act to mar its symmetry by the introduction of loathly and
misshapen blocks like those which Cardan, had he been the artist, would
have chosen first of all.
Naudé, after he has recorded the fact that, from his first essay in letters, he
had been a zealous and appreciative student of Cardan's works, sets down
Cardan's picture of himself, taken from his own Horoscope in the
Geniturarum Exempla, "nugacem, religionis contemptorem, injuriæ illatæ
memorem, invidum, tristem, insidiatorem, proditorem, magum,
incantatorem, frequentibus calamitatibus obnoxium, suorum osorē, turpi
libidini deditum, solitarium, inamœnum, austerum, spontè etiam
divinantem, zelotypum, lascivum, obscœnum, maledicum, obsequiosum,
senum conversatione se delectantem, varium, ancipitem, impurū, et dolis
mulierum obnoxium, calumniatorem, et omnino incognitum propter naturæ
et morum repugnantiam, etiam his cum quibus assidue versor." The critic at
once goes on to state that in his opinion this description, drawn by the
person who ought to know best, is, in the main, a correct one. What better
account could you expect, he asks, of a man who put faith in dreams and
portents and auguries; who believed fully in the utterances of crazy
beldames, who saw ghosts, and who believed he was attended by a familiar
demon? Then follows a catalogue of moral offences and defects of
character, all taken from Cardan's own confessions, and a pronunciation by
Naudé that the man who says he never lies, must be of all liars the greatest;
the charge of mendacity being driven home by references to Cardan's
alleged miraculous comprehension of the classic tongues in a single night,

and his pretended knowledge of a cure for phthisis. There is no need to
follow Naudé farther in his diatribe against the faults and imperfections,
real and apparent, of Cardan's character; these must be visible enough to the
most cursory student. Passages like these arouse the suspicion that Naudé
knew books better than men, that at any rate he did not realize that men are
to be found, and not seldom, who take pleasure in magnifying their foibles
into gigantic follies, and their peccadilloes into atrocious crimes; while the
rarity is to come across one who will set down these details with the
circumstantiality used by Cardan. There is one defect in the De Vita Propria
—an artistic one—which Naudé does not notice, namely, that in his
narrative of his early days Cardan often over-reaches himself. His show of
extreme accuracy destroys the perspective of the story, and, in his anxiety to
be minute over the sequence of his childish ailments, the most trivial details
of his uneasy dreams, and the cuffs he got from his father and his Aunt
Margaret, he confuses the reader with multitudinous particulars and ceases
to be dramatic. But the hallucinations which he nourished about himself
were not all the outcome of senility. In the De Varietate, the work upon
which he spent the greatest care, and the product moreover of his golden
prime, he gives an account of four marvellous properties with which he was
gifted.[248] The first of these was the power to pass, whenever the whim
seized him, from sense into a kind of ecstasy. While he was in this state he
could hear but faintly the sound of voices, and could not distinguish spoken
words. Whether he would be sensitive to any great pain he could not say,
but twitchings and the sharpest attacks of gout affected him not. When he
fell into this state he felt a certain separation about the heart, as if his soul
were departing from that region and taking possession of his whole body, a
door being opened for the passage of the same. The sensation would begin
in the cerebellum, and thence would be diffused along the spine. The one
thing of which he was fully conscious, was that he had passed out of
himself. The second property was that, when he would, he could conjure up
any images he liked before his eyes, real είδωλα, and not at all to be
compared with the blurred processions of phantoms which he was wont to
see when he was a child. At the time when he wrote, perhaps by reason of
his busy life, he no longer saw them whensoever he would, nor so perfectly
expressed, nor for so long at a time. These images constantly gave place
one to another, and he would behold groves, and animals, and orbs, and
whatever he was fain to see. This property he attributed to the force of his

imaginative power, and his clearness of vision. The third property was that
he never failed to be warned in dreams of things about to happen to him;
and the fourth was that premonitory signs of coming events would display
themselves in the form of spots on his nails. The signs of evil were black or
livid, and appeared on the middle finger; white spots on the same nail
portending good fortune. Honours were indicated on the thumb, riches on
the fore-finger, matters relating to his studies and of grave import on the
third finger, and minor affairs on the little finger.
In putting together the record of his life, Cardan eschewed the narrative
form and followed a method of his own. He collected the details of his
qualities, habits, and adventures in separate chapters; his birth and lineage,
his physical stature, his diet, his rule of life, his imperfections, his poverty,
the misfortunes of his sons, his masters and pupils, his travels, his
experiences of things beyond nature, his cures, the persecutions of his foes,
and divers other categories being grouped together to make up the De Vita
Propria, which, though it is the most interesting book he has left behind
him, is certainly the most clumsy and chaotic from a literary point of view.
The chapters for the most part begin with his early years, and end with
some detail as to his life in Rome, each one being a categorical survey of a
certain side of his life; but remarks as to his personal peculiarities are
scattered about from beginning to end. He tells how he could always see the
moon in broad daylight;[249] of his passion for wandering about the city by
night carrying arms forbidden by the law; of his practice of self-torture,
beating his legs with a switch, twisting his fingers, pinching his flesh, and
biting his left arm; and of going about within doors with naked legs; how at
one time he was possessed with the desire, heroica passio, of suicide; of his
habit of filling his house with pets of all sorts—kids, lambs, hares, rabbits,
and storks. The chapter in which he records all the maladies which afflicted
him, puts upon the reader's credulity a burden almost as heavy as is the
catalogue given by another philosopher of the number of authors he
mastered before his twelfth year. Two attacks of the plague, agues, tertian
and quotidian, malignant ulcers, hernia, hæmorrhoids, varicose veins,
palpitation of the heart, gout, indigestion, the itch, and foulness of skin.
Relief in the second attack of plague came from a sweat so copious that it
soaked the bed and ran in streams down to the floor; and, in a case of
continuous fever, from voiding a hundred and twenty ounces of urine. As a

boy he was a sleep-walker, and he never became warm below the knees till
he had been in bed six hours, a circumstance which led his mother to
predict that his time on earth would be brief.
Cardan lived an abstemious life. He broke his fast on bread-and-water and a
few grapes. He sometimes dined off bread, the yolk of an egg, and a little
wine, and would take for supper a mess of beetroot and rice and a chicory
salad. The catalogue of his favourite dishes seems to exhaust every known
edible, and it will suffice to remark that he was specially inclined to sound
and well-stewed wild boar, the wings of young cockerels and the livers of
pullets, oysters, mussels, fresh-water crayfish because his mother ate
greedily thereof when she was pregnant with him; but of all dishes he rates
the best a carp from three pounds weight to seven, taken from a good
feeding-ground. He praises all sweet fruit, oil, olives, and finds in rue an
antidote to poison. Ten o'clock was his hour for going to bed, and he
allowed himself eight hours' sleep. When wakeful he would walk about the
room and repeat the multiplication table. As a further remedy for
sleeplessness he would reduce his food by half, and would anoint his thighs,
the soles of his feet, the neck, the elbows, the carpal bones, the temples, the
jugulars, the region of the heart and of the liver, and the upper lip with
ointment of poplars, or the fat of bear, or the oil of water-lilies.
These few extracts will show that an intelligible narrative could scarcely be
produced by the methods Cardan used. The book is a collection of facts,
classified as a scientific writer would arrange the sections and subsections
of his subject. In gathering together and grouping the leading points of his
life, a method somewhat similar to his own will suffice, but there will be no
need to descend to a subdivision so minute as his own. A task of this sort is
never an easy one, and in this instance the difficulties are increased by the
diffuse and complicated nature of the subject matter; and because, owing to
Cardan's wayward mental habit, there is no saying in what corner of the ten
large folios which contain his writings some pregnant and characteristic
sentence, picturing effectively some aspect of his nature or perhaps
exhibiting the man at a glance, may not be hidden away.
It must not be inferred, because Cardan himself and his critics after him,
have laid such great stress upon his vices and imperfections, that he was
devoid of virtues. The most striking and remarkable of his merits was his

industry, but even in this particular instance, where his excellence is most
clearly manifest, he is constantly lamenting his waste of time and idleness.
Again and again he mourns over the precious hours he has spent over chess
and dice and games of chance. In his counsels to his children, he compares
a gambler to a sink of all the vices, and in writing of his early life at Sacco
he describes himself as an idle profligate, and tells how he entirely
neglected his profession. If indeed such monstrous cantles were cut out of
his time through idleness he must, though his life proved a long one, have
possessed extraordinary power of rapid production; for the huge mass of his
published work, without taking any account of the many manuscripts he
burned from time to time, would, in the case of most men, represent the
ceaseless labour of a long life. And the corpus is not great by reason of
haste or want of finish. He has recorded more than once how it was ever his
habit to let his work be polished to the utmost before putting it in type. The
citations with which his pages bristle proclaim him to be a reader almost as
voracious and catholic as Burton; and Naudé, with the watchfulness of the
hostile critic in his heart and the bookworm's knowledge in his brain, would
have been ready and able to convict him of quoting authors he had not read,
if the least handle for this charge should have been given, but no accusation
of the kind is preferred. The story of his life shows him to be full of rough
candour and honesty, and unlikely to descend to subterfuge, while his great
love of reading and his accurate retentive memory would make easy for him
a task which ordinary mortals might well regard as hopeless.
Those critics who pass judgment on Cardan, taken solely as a Physician or
as a Mathematician, will give a presentment more fallacious than imperfect
generalizations usually furnish, for in Cardan's case the man, taken as a
whole, was incomparably greater than the sum of his parts. Naudé remarks
that a man who knows a little of everything, and that little imperfectly,
deserves small respect as a citizen of the republic of letters, but Cardan did
not belong to this category, as Julius Cæsar Scaliger found to his cost. He
was not like the bookmen of the revival of learning—Poliziano, Valla, or
Alberti may stand as examples—who after putting on the armour of the
learned language and saturating themselves with the literæ humaniores,
made excursions into some domain of science for the sake of recreation.
Cardan might rather be compared with Varro or Theophrastus in classic, and
with Erasmus, Pico, Grotius, or Casaubon in modern times. On this point

Naudé indulges in something approaching panegyric. He writes
—"Investigation will show us that many excelled him in the humanities or
in Theology, some even in Mathematics, some in Medicine and in the
knowledge of Philosophy, some in Oriental tongues and in either side of
Jurisprudence, but where shall we find any one who had mastered so many
sciences by himself, who had plumbed so deeply the abysses of learning
and had written such ample commentaries on the subjects he studied?
Assuredly in Philosophy, in Metaphysics, in History, in Politics, in Morals,
as well as in the more abstruse fields of learning, nothing that was worth
consideration escaped his notice."
The foregoing eulogy from the pen of an adverse critic gives eloquent
testimony to Cardan's industry and the catholicity of his knowledge. As to
his industry, the record of his literary production, chronicled incidentally in
the course of the preceding pages, will be evidence enough, seeing that,
from the time when he "commenced author," scarcely a year went by when
he did not print a volume of some sort or other; to say nothing of the
production of those multitudinous unpublished MSS., of which some went
to build up the pile he burnt in his latter years in Rome, while others,
perhaps, are still mouldering in the presses of university or city libraries of
Italy. Frequent reference has been made to the more noteworthy of his
works. Books like the De Vita Propria, the De Libris Propriis, the De
Utilitate ex Adversis Capienda, the Geniturarum Exempla, the Theonoston,
the Consilia Medica, the dialogues Tetim and De Morte, have necessarily
been drawn upon for biographical facts. The De Subtilitate and the De
Varietate Rerum; the Liber Artis Magnæ, the Practica Arithmeticæ, have
been noticed as the most enduring portions of his legacy to posterity;
wherefore, before saying the final word as to his literary achievement, it
may not be superfluous to give a brief glance at those of his books which,
although of minor importance to those already cited, engaged considerable
attention in the lifetime of the writer.
The work upon which Cardan founded his chief hope of immortality was
his Commentary on Hippocrates. In bulk it ranks first easily, filling as it
does one of the large folios of the edition of 1663. Curiously enough, in
addition to a permanent place in the annals of medicine, Cardan anticipated
for this forgotten mass of type a general and immediate popularity; wider
than any which his technical works could possibly enjoy, seeing that it dealt

with the preservation of health, the greatest mortal blessing, and must on
this account be of interest to all men. It will be enough to remark of these
commentaries that no portion of Cardan's work yields less information as to
the author's life and personality; to dilate upon them, ever so superficially,
from a scientific point of view, would be waste of time and paper. Another
of his works, which he rated highly, was his treatise on Music. It was begun
during his tenure of office at Pavia, circa 1547, and he was still at work
upon it two years before his death.[250] It is not difficult to realize, even at
this interval of time, that this book at the date of its publication must have
been welcomed by all musical students as a valuable contribution to the
literature of their subject. It is strongly marked by Cardan's particular touch,
that formative faculty by which he almost always succeeded in stimulating
fresh interest in the reader, and exhibiting fresh aspects of whatever subject
he might be treating. This work begins by laying down at length the general
rules and principles of the art, and then goes on to treat of ancient music in
all its forms; of music as Cardan knew and enjoyed it; of the system of
counterpoint and composition, and of the construction of musical
instruments.
The Commentary on Ptolemæi de Astrorum Judiciis, the writing of which
beguiled the tedium of his voyage down the Loire on his journey to Paris in
1552, is a book upon which he spent great care, and is certainly worthy of
notice. Cardan's gratitude to Archbishop Hamilton for the liberal treatment
and gracious reception he had recently encountered in Scotland, prompted
him to dedicate this volume to his late patient. He writes in the preface how
he had expected to find the Scots a pack of barbarians, but their country, he
affirms, is cultivated and humanized beyond belief,—"and you yourself
reflect such splendour upon your nation that now, by the very lustre of your
name, it must needs appear to the world more noble and illustrious than at
any time heretofore. What need is there for me to speak of the school
founded by you at St. Andrews, of sedition quelled, of your country
delivered, of the authority of your brother the Regent vindicated? These are
merely the indications of your power, and not the source thereof." In the
preface he also writes at length, concerning the horoscope of Christ,[251] in
a strain of apology, as if he scented already the scandal which the
publication of this injudicious performance was destined to raise. In
estimating the influence of comets he sets down several instances which

had evidently been brought to his notice during his sojourn in Scotland:
how in 1165, within fourteen days of the appearance of a great comet,
Malcolm IV., known on account of his continence as the virgin king, fell
sick and died. Again, in 1214 two comets, one preceding and the other
following the sun, appeared as fore-runners of the death of King William
after a reign of forty-nine years. Perhaps the most interesting of his
comments on Ptolemy's text are those which estimate the power of the
stellar influences on the human frame, an aspect of the question which, by
reason of his knowledge of medicine and surgery, would naturally engage
his more serious attention. He tells of the birth of a monstrous child—a
most loathsome malformation—at Middleton Stoney, near Oxford, during
his stay in England,[252] and gives many other instances of the disastrous
effects of untoward conjunction of the planets upon infants born under the
influence of the same. He accuses monks and nuns of detestable vices in the
plainest words, words which were probably read by the emissaries of the
spiritual authority when the charge of impiety was being got up against him.
In the Geniturarum Exempla the horoscopes of Edward VI., Archbishop
Hamilton, and Cardan himself have been already noticed; that of Sir John
Cheke comes next in interest to these, and, it must be admitted, is no more
trustworthy. It declares that Cheke would attain the age of sixty-one years,
that he would be most fortunate in gathering wealth and friends around him,
that he would die finally of lingering disease, and involve many in
misfortune by his death—a faulty guess, indeed, as to the future of a man
who died at forty-three, borne down by the weight of his misfortunes,
neglected and forgotten by his former adherents, stripped of his wealth and
covered with shame, in that he had abjured his faith to save a life which was
so little worth preserving.
Naudé does not neglect to censure Cardan for his maladroit attempts to read
the future. He writes:—"This matter, forsooth, gave a ready handle to
Cardan's rivals, and especially to those who were sworn foes of astrology;
so that they were able to jibe at him freely because, neither in his own
horoscope, nor in that of his son Giovanni Battista, nor in that of Aymer
Ranconet, nor in that of Edward VI., king of England, nor in any other of
the schemes that he drew, did he rightly foresee any of the events which
followed. He did not divine that he himself was doomed to imprisonment,
his son to the halter, Ranconet to a violent death, and Edward to a brief term

of life, but predicted for each one of these some future directly contrary."
[253]

The treatise De Consolatione, probably the best known of Cardan's ethical
works, was first published at Venice in 1542 by Girolamo Scoto, but it
failed at first to please the public taste. It was not until 1544, when it was
re-issued bound up with the De Sapientia and the first version of the De
Libris Propriis from the press of Petreius at Nuremberg, that it met with any
success. Perhaps the sober tone and didactic method of this treatise
appealed more readily to the mood of the German than of the Italian reader.
From internal evidence it is obvious that Cardan was urged to write it by the
desire of making known to the world the bitter experience of his early
literary and professional struggles. In the opening paragraph he lets it be
seen that he intends to follow a Ciceronian model, and records his regret
that the lament of Cicero over his daughter's death should have perished in
the barbarian wars. The original title of the book was The Accuser, to wit,
something which might censure the vain passions and erring tendencies of
mankind, "at post mutato nomine, et in tres libellos diviso, de Consolatione
eum inscripsimus, quod longe magis infelices consolatione, quam fortunati
reprehensione, indigere viderentur." The subsequent success of the book
was probably due to this change of name, though the author himself
preferred to have discovered a special reason for its early failure.[254] The
plan of the treatise is the same as that of a dozen others of the same nature:
an effort to persuade men in evil case that they may find relief by regarding
the misfortunes they suffer as transitory accidents in no way affecting the
chief end of life, and by seeking happiness alone in trafficking with the
riches of the mind.
It is doubtful whether any of the books written with this object have ever
served their purpose, save in the case of their originators. Cardan may have
found the burden of his failure and poverty grow lighter as he set down his
woes on paper, but the rest of the world must have read the book for some
other reason than the hope of consolation. Read to-day in Bedingfield's
quaint English, the book is full of charm and interest. It is filled with apt
illustration from Greek philosophy and from Holy Writ as well, and lighted
up by spaces of lively wit. It was accepted by the public taste for reasons
akin to those which would secure popularity for a clever volume of essays
at the present time, and was translated into more than one foreign language,

Bedingfield's translation being published some thirty years after its first
appearance.
The De Sapientia, with which it is generally classed, is of far less interest. It
is a series of ethical discourses, lengthy and discursive, which must have
seemed dull enough to contemporary students: to read it through now would
be a task almost impossible. It is only remembered because Cardan has
inserted therein, somewhat incongruously, that account of his asserted cures
of phthisis which Cassanate quoted when he wrote to Cardan about
Archbishop Hamilton's asthma, and which were afterwards seized upon by
hostile critics as evidence of his disregard of truth.
Another of his minor works highly characteristic of the author is the
Somniorum Synesiorum, a collection of all the remarkable dreams he ever
dreamt, many of which have been already noticed. To judge from what
specimens of his epistles are extant, Cardan seems to have been a good
letter-writer. One of the most noteworthy is that which he addressed to Gian
Battista after his marriage. It shows Cardan to have been a loving father and
a master of sapient exhortation, while the son's fate gives melancholy
testimony of the futility of good counsel unaided by direction and example.
He tells of his grief at seeing the evil case into which his son had fallen,
vexed by poverty, disgrace, and loss of health, how he would gladly even
now receive the prodigal into his house (he says nothing about the wife),
did he not fear that such a step would lead to his own ruin rather than to his
son's restoration. After showing that any fresh misfortune to himself must
needs cut away the last hope for Gian Battista, he sketches out a line of
conduct for the ill-starred youth which he declared, if rightly pursued, might
re-establish his fortunes.
He begins by advising his son to read and lay to heart the contents of the De
Consolatione and the De Utilitate, and then, somewhat more to the purpose,
promises him half his earnings of the present and the coming year. Beyond
this Gian Battista should have half the salary of any office which his father
might get for himself, and half of the piece of silk which he had received
from the Venetian Ambassador, supposing that the young man should not be
able to get a like piece for himself from the same source.

He next cites the De Consolatione to demonstrate the futility of lamentation
over misfortune past or present, or indeed over any decree of fate. He bids
Gian Battista reflect that he is human not a brute, a man not a woman, a
Christian not a Moslem or Jew, an Italian not a barbarian, sprung from a
worthy city and family, and from a father whose name by itself will prove a
title to fame. His only real troubles are a weak body and infirm health—one
a gift of heredity, the other aggravated by dissolute habits. It may be a vain
thing for men to congratulate themselves over their happiness, but it is
vainer for them to cry out for solace over past calamity. Contempt of money
is foolish, but contempt of God is ten times worse. Cardan concludes this
part of his letter by reciting two maxims given him by his father—one, to
have daily remembrance of God and of His vast bounty, the other, to pursue
with the utmost diligence any task taken in hand.
Cardan then treats the scapegrace to a string of maxims from the De
Utilitate, maxims which a model son might have read, but which Gian
Battista would certainly put aside unnoticed, and finishes with some
serviceable practical counsel: "Keep your mind calm, go early to bed, for
ours is a hot-blooded race and predisposed to suffer from stone. Take nine
hours' sleep, rise at six and visit your patients, being careful to use no
speech unconnected with the case before you. Avoid heating your body to
perspiration; go forth on horseback, come back on foot; and on your return
put on warm clothes. Drink little, break your fast on bread, dried fish, and
meat, and then give four hours to study, for studies bring pleasure, relief
from care, and mental riches; they are the foundations of renown, and
enable a man to do his duty with credit. See your patients again; and, before
you sup, take exercise in the woods and fields adjacent. Should you become
over-heated or wet with rain, cast off and dry your damp clothes, and don
dry ones. Sup heartily, and go to bed at eight; and when, by the brevity of
the night, this is not convenient, take a corresponding rest during the day.
Abstain from summer fruit, from black wine, from vain overflow of talk,
from falsehood and gaming, from trusting a woman or over-indulging her,
for she is a foolish animal and full of deceit. Over-fondness towards a
woman will surely bring evil upon you. Bleed and purge yourself as little as
possible; learn by experience of other men's faults and misfortunes; live
frugally; bear yourself suavely to all men; and let study be your main end.
All this and more have I set forth in the books I have named. Trust neither

promises nor hopes, for these may be vain and delusive; and reckon your
own only that which you hold in your hand. Farewell."
From the fact that Cardan took part in an unofficial medical conference in
Paris, that he afterwards superseded Cassanate as the Archbishop of St.
Andrews' physician, and did not find himself with a dozen or so quarrels on
his hands, it may be assumed that he was laudably free from the jealousy
attributed by tradition to his profession. This instance becomes all the more
noteworthy when his natural irascibility, and the character of the learned
controversy of the times comes to be considered. He does not spare his
censure in remarking on the too frequent quarrels of men of letters,[255]
albeit these quarrels must have lent no little gaiety to the literary world. No
one who reads the account of Gian Battista's fate can doubt the sincerity of
Cardan's remorse for that neglect of the boy's youthful training which
helped to bring him to ruin, and the care which he bestowed upon his
grandson Fazio proved that his regret was not of that sort which exhales
itself in empty words. The zeal with which he threw himself into the
struggle for his son's life, and his readiness to strip himself of his last coin
as the fight went on, show that he was capable of warm-hearted affection,
and afraid of no sacrifice in the cause of duty.
The brutal candour which Cardan used in probing the weaknesses of his
own nature and in displaying them to the world, he used likewise in his
dealings with others. If he detected Branda Porro or Camutio in a blunder
he would inform them they were blockheads without hesitation, and plume
himself afterwards on the score of his blunt honesty. Veracity was not a
common virtue in those days, but Cardan laid claim to it with a display of
insistence which was not, perhaps, in the best taste. Over and over again he
writes that he never told a lie;[256] a contention which seems to have roused
especially the bile of Naudé, and to have spurred him on to make his
somewhat clumsy assault on Cardan's veracity.[257] His citation of the case
of the stranger who came with the volume of Apuleius for sale, and of the
miraculous gift of classic tongues, has already been referred to; but these
may surely be attributed to an exaggerated activity of that particular side of
Cardan's imagination which was specially prone to seize upon some
figment of the brain, and some imperfectly apprehended sensation of the
optic nerve, and fashion from these materials a tale of marvel. Delusions of

this sort were common in reputed witches, as Reginald Scot writes—"They
learne strange toongs with small industrie (as Aristotle and others affirme)."
[258]
The other charge preferred by Naudé as to the pretended cure of
consumption, and the consequent quibbling and tergiversation, is a more
valid one. It has been noted how Cardan, previous to his journey to
Scotland, had posed as the discoverer of a cure for this malady. In the list of
his cures successfully treated he includes several in which he restored
patients suffering from blood-spitting, fever, and extreme emaciation to
sound health, the most noteworthy of these being that of Girolamo Tiboldo,
a sea-captain. When the sick man had risen from his bed and had become
fat and healthy, Cardan deemed that the occasion justified a certain amount
of self-gratulation, but the physicians, out of envy, declared that Tiboldo
had never suffered from true phthisis. In his account of the case Cardan says
that he, and the physicians as well, were indeed untruthful over the matter,
his own falsehood having been the result of over-sanguine hope, and theirs
the outcome of spiteful envy. Tiboldo died after all of chest disease, but not
till five years later, and then from a chill caught through sitting in wet
garments.[259] The term consumption has always been applied somewhat
loosely, and Cardan probably would have been allowed the benefit of this
usage if he had not, in an excess of candour, set down the workings of his
mind and conscience with regard to this matter. Writing of his treatment of
Archbishop Hamilton, he says: "And in truth I cured scarcely any patients
of phthisic disease, though I did find a remedy for many who were suffering
from similar maladies, wherefore that boast of mine, that proclamation of
merit to which I had no right, worked no small profit to me, a man very
little given to lying. For the people about the Archbishop, urged on by these
and other considerations, persuaded him that he had no chance of regaining
his health except by putting himself under my care, and that he should fly to
me as his last hope."[260] It has already been noted that Cardan's claim to
some past knowledge in the successful treatment of chest diseases had
weight with the Archbishop and Cassanate, and the result of his visit surely
proved that their confidence was not ill-placed; his boasting may have been
a trifle excessive, but it was based on hope rather than achievement; and if
proof can be adduced that it was not prompted by any greed of illegitimate
fame or profit, it may justly be ranked as a weakness rather than as a serious
offence. To these two instances of falsehood Naudé adds a third, to wit,
Cardan's claim to the guidance of a familiar spirit. He refuses to let this rank

as a delusion; and, urged no doubt by righteous indignation against the ills
springing from kindred superstitions, he writes down as a liar rather than a
dupe the man who, after mastering the whole world of science, could
profess such folly.
Considering the catholicity of Cardan's achievements, and the eager spirit of
inquiry he displayed in fields of learning remote from his own particular
one, it is worthy of notice that he did not allow this discursive humour,
which is not seldom a token of instability, to hold him back from pursuing
the supreme aim of his life, that is, eminence in the art of Medicine. In his
youth the threats and persuasions of his father could not induce him to take
up Jurisprudence with an assured income and abandon Medicine. At Sacco,
at Gallarate, and afterwards in Milan he was forced by the necessity of
bread-winning to use his pen in all sorts of minor subjects that had no real
fascination for him, but all his leisure was devoted to the acquisition of
Medical knowledge. Prudence as well as inclination had a share in directing
his energies into this channel, for a report, for which no doubt there was
some warrant, was spread abroad that what skill he had lay entirely in the
knowledge of Astrology; and, as this rumour operated greatly to his
prejudice,[261] he resolved to perfect himself in Medicine and free his
reputation from this aspersion. He had quarrelled violently with the
physicians over the case of Count Borromeo's child which died, and with
Borromeo himself, and, almost immediately after this, he published his
book, De Astrorum Judiciis, a step which tended to identify him yet more
closely with Astrology, and to raise a cry against him in Milan, which he
declares to be the most scandal-mongering city in the Universe. But it is
clear that in this instance scandal was not far wrong, and that Cardan
himself was right in purging himself of the quasi science he ought never to
have taken up.
Medicine, when Cardan began his studies, was beginning to feel the effects
of the revival of Greek learning. With the restored knowledge of the
language of Greece there arose a desire to investigate the storehouses of
science, as well as those of literature, and the extravagant assumption of the
dogmatists, and the eccentricities of the Arabic school gave additional
cogency to the cry for more light. The sects which Galen had endeavoured
to unite sprang into new activity within a century after his death. The
Arabian physicians, acute and curious as they were, had exercised but a

very transient influence upon the real progress of the art, the chief cause of
their non-success being their adhesion to arbitrary and empirical tradition.
At the end of the fifteenth century, Leonicinus, a professor at Ferrara,
recalled the allegiance of his pupils to the authority of Hippocrates by the
ability and eloquence of his teaching; and, by his translation of Galen's
works into Latin, he helped still farther to confirm the ascendency of the
fathers of Medicine. The Arabians, sprung from the East, the storehouse of
drugs and simples, and skilled in Chemistry, were the founders of the
Pharmacopœia,[262] but with this exception they did nothing to advance
Medicine beyond the point where the Greeks had left it. The treatises of
Haly, Avicenna, and Maimonides were little better than faint transcriptions
of the writings of the great forerunners. Their teaching was random and
spasmodic, whereas the system of Hippocrates was conceived in the spirit
of Greek philosophy, moving on by select experience, always observant and
cautious, and ascending by slow and certain steps to the generalities of
Theory. Indeed the science of Medicine in the hands of Hippocrates and his
school seems, more than any other, to have presented to the world a
rudimentary essay, a faint foreshadowing of the great fabric of inductive
process, subsequently formulated by the genius of Bacon. At various epochs
Medicine had been specially stimulated by the vivifying spirit of Greek
science; in the Roman school in the days of Celsus, and in the Arabian
teaching likewise. Fuller acknowledgment of the authority of Greek
Medicine came with the Renaissance,[263] but even this long step in advance
did not immediately liberate the art from bondage. A new generation of
professors arose who added fresh material to the storehouses, already
overflowing, of pedantic erudition, and showed the utmost contempt for any
fruit of other men's labour which might not square exactly with the
utterances of the founders. This attitude rendered these professors of
Medicine the legitimate objects of ridicule, as soon as the leaven of the
revival began to work, and the darts of satire still fly, now and then, at the
same quarry. Paracelsus, disfigured as his teaching was by mysticism, the
arts of the charlatan, and by his ignorant repudiation of the service of
Anatomy, struck the first damaging blows at this illegitimate ascendency, by
the frequent success of his empirical treatment, by the contempt he heaped
upon the scholastic authorities, and by the boldness with which he assailed
every thesis which they maintained. Men of more sober intellect and
weighty learning soon followed in his track. Fernelius, one of the

physicians Cardan met in Paris, boldly rejected what he could not approve
by experience in the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, and stood forth as
the advocate for free inquiry, and Joubert of Montpelier, Argentier of Turin,
and Botal of Asti subsequently took a similar course.
When Cardan went to study at Pavia in 1519 this tradition was unshaken. It
was not until the advent of Vesalius that the doom of the ancient system was
sounded. Then, when Anatomy sprang to the front as the potent ally of
Medicine, the science of healing entered upon a fresh stage, but this new
force did not make itself felt soon enough to seduce Cardan from the altars
of the ancients to the worship of new gods. As long as he lived he was a
follower of the great masters, though at the same time his admiration of the
teaching of Vesalius was enthusiastic and profound. His love of truth and
sound learning forbade him to give unreflecting adhesion to the precepts of
any man, however eminent, and when he found that Galen was a careless
commentator on Hippocrates,[264] and failed to elucidate the difficulties
with which he professed to deal, he did not spare his censure.[265] In the De
Subtilitate he speaks of him as "Verbosus et studio contradicendi tædulus ut
alterum vix ferre queas, in reliquo gravis jactura artium posita sit, quam
nostræ ætatis viri restituere conati sunt."[266] But as Galen's name is quoted
as an authority on almost every page of the Consilia Medica, it may be
assumed that Cardan's faith in his primary theories was unshaken. In his
Commentaries on Hippocrates, Galen professes a profound respect for his
master, but the two great men must be regarded as the leaders of rival
schools; indeed it could hardly be otherwise, seeing how vast was the mass
of knowledge which Galen added to the art during his lifetime.
Hippocrates, by denying the supernatural origin of disease, by his method
of diagnosis, by the importance he attached to air and diet, by his
discriminating use of drugs, and by the simplicity of his system generally,
had placed Medicine on a rational basis. In the six hundred years' space
which elapsed before the appearance of Galen, Medicine was broken up
into many rival schools. The Dogmatici and the Empirici for many years
wrangled undisturbed, but shortly after the Christian era the Methodici
entered the field, to be followed later on by the Eclectici and a troop of
other sects, whose wranglings, and whose very names, are now forgotten. In
his History of Medicine, Dr. Bostock gives a sketch of the attitude of Galen

towards the rival schools. "In his general principles he may be considered
as belonging to the Dogmatic sect, for his method was to reduce all his
knowledge, as acquired by the observation of facts, to general theoretical
principles. These principles he indeed professed to deduce from experience
and observation,[267] and we have abundant proofs of his diligence in
collecting experience and his accuracy in making observations; but still, in
a certain sense at least, he regards individual facts and the details of
experience as of little value, unconnected with the principles which he laid
down as the basis of all medical reasoning. In this fundamental point,
therefore, the method pursued by Galen appears to have been directly the
reverse of that which we now consider as the correct method of scientific
investigation; and yet, such is the force of actual genius, that in most
instances he attained the ultimate object in view, although by an indirect
path. He was an admirer of Hippocrates, and always speaks of him with the
most profound respect, professing to act upon his principles, and to do little
more than expound his doctrines and support them by new facts and
observations. Yet in reality we have few writers whose works, both as to
substance and manner, are more different from each other than those of
Hippocrates and Galen, the simplicity of the former being strongly
contrasted with the abstruseness and refinement of the latter."
The antagonism between these two great men was not perhaps more marked
than might have been expected, considering that an interval of six hundred
years lay between them. However loyal he may have been to his master,
Galen, with his keen, catholic, and subtle intellect, was bound to fall under
the sway of Alexandrian influence while he studied in Alexandria as the
pupil of Heraclianus. The methods of the contemporary school of
philosophy fascinated him; and, in his endeavour to bring Medicine out of
the chaotic welter in which he found it, he attempted—unhappily for the
future of science—to use the hyper-idealistic Platonism then dominant in
Alexandria, rather than the gradual and orderly induction of Hippocrates, as
a bond of union between professional and scientific medicine; a false step
for which not even his great services to anatomy and physiology can
altogether atone. Yet most likely it was this same error, an error which
practically led to the enslavement of Medicine till the seventeenth century,
which caused Cardan to regard him, and not Hippocrates, as his master. The
vastness and catholicity of Galen's scheme of Medicine must have been

peculiarly attractive to a man of Cardan's temper; and that Galen attempted
to reconcile the incongruous in the teleological system which he devised,
would not have been rated as a fault by his Milanese disciple.
Galen taught as a cardinal truth the doctrine of the Hippocratic elements,
heat, cold, moisture, and dryness, and a glance at the Consilium which
Cardan wrote out on Archbishop Hamilton's illness, will show how
completely he was under the sway of this same teaching. The genius of
Hippocrates was perhaps too sober and orderly to win his entire sympathy;
the encyclopædic knowledge, the literary grace, and the more daring flights
of Galen's intellect attracted him much more strongly. Hippocrates scoffed
at charms and amulets, while Galen commended them, and is said to have
invented the anodyne necklace which was long known and worn in
England. There is no need to specify which of the masters Cardan would
swear by in this matter. The choice which Cardan made, albeit it was
exactly what might have been anticipated, was in every respect an
unfortunate one. He put himself under a master whose teaching could have
no other effect than to accentuate the failings of the pupil, whereas had he
let his mind come under the more regular discipline of Hippocrates' method,
it is almost certain that the mass of his work, now shut in dusty folios which
stand undisturbed on the shelves for decade after decade, would have been
immeasurably more fruitful of good. With all his industry in collecting, and
his care in verifying, his medical work remains a heap of material, and
nothing more valuable. Learning and science would have profited much had
he put himself under the standard of the Father of Medicine, and still more
if fate had sent him into being at some period after the world of letters had
learned to realize the capabilities of the inductive system of Philosophy.
It may readily be conceded that Cardan during his career turned to good
account the medical knowledge which he had gathered from the best
attainable sources, and that he was on the whole the most skilful physician
of his age. He likewise foreshadowed the system of deaf mute instruction. A
certain Georgius Agricola, a physician of Heidelberg who died in 1485,
makes mention of a deaf mute who had learnt to read and write, but this
statement was received with incredulity. Cardan, taking a more philosophic
view, declared that people thus afflicted might easily be taught to hear by
reading, and to speak by writing; writing was associated with speech, and
speech with thought, but written characters and ideas might be connected

without the intervention of sounds.[268] This view, put forward with all the
authority of Cardan's name, would certainly rouse fresh interest in the
question, and, whether stimulated by his words or not, an attempt to teach
deaf mutes was made by Pedro de Ponce, a Spanish Dominican, about
1560. But it would not be permissible to claim for Cardan any share in the
epoch-making discoveries in Medicine. Galen as an experimental
physiologist had brought diagnosis to a level unattained before. His
methods had been abandoned by his successors, and practice had in
consequence suffered deterioration, but Cardan, studying under the revived
Galenism, called into life by the teaching of Vesalius, went to deal with his
cures under conditions more favourable than those offered by any previous
period of the world's history. His cure of Archbishop Hamilton's asthma,
over which Cassanate and the other doctors had failed, was due to a more
careful diagnosis and a more judicious application of existing rules, rather
than to the working of any new discoveries of his own. Viewed as a soldier
in the service of Hygeia, how transient and slender is the fame of Cardan
compared with that of Linacre, Vesalius, or Harvey! Were his claims to
immortality to rest entirely on his contribution to Medicine, his name would
have gone down to oblivion along with that of Cavenago, Camutio, Della
Croce, and the multitude of jealous rivals who, according to his account,
were ever plotting his downfall. But it was rescued from this fate by his
excellence as a mathematician, by the interest clinging to his personality, by
the enormous range of his learning, by his picturesque reputation as a
dreamer of dreams, and a searcher into the secrets of the hidden world. In
an age when books were few and ill-composed, his works became widely
popular; because, although he dealt with abstruse subjects, he wrote—as
even Naudé admits—in a passably good style, and handled his subject with
a lightness of touch which was then very rare. This was the reason why men
went on reading him long after his works had ceased to have any scientific
value; which induced writers like Burton and Sir Thomas Browne to
embroider their pages freely with quotations from his works, and thus make
his name familiar to many who have never handled a single one of his
volumes.
It is somewhat strange to find running through the complex web of Cardan's
character a well-defined thread of worldly wisdom and common-sense; to
find that a man, described by almost every one who has dealt with his

character as a credulous simpleton, one with disordered wits, or a down-
right madman, should, when occasion demanded, prove himself to be a
sharp man of business. When Fazio died he left his son with a number of
unsettled law-suits on hand, concerning which he writes: "From my father's
death until I was forty-six, that is to say for a space of twenty-three years, I
was almost continually involved in law-suits. First with Alessandro
Castillione, surnamed Gatico, with respect to certain plantations, and
afterwards with his kinsfolk. Next with the Counts of Barbiani, next with
the college, next with the heirs of Dominico de Tortis, who had held me in
his arms when I was baptized. Out of all these suits I came victorious. It
was indeed a matter for surprise that I should have got the better of
Alessandro Castillione, seeing that his uncle sat as judge. Moreover, he had
already got a decision against me, a decision which, as the jurisconsults
declared, helped my case as the trial went on, and I was able to force him to
pay me all the money which was in dispute. A like good fortune attended
me while my claims were considered by the heads of the Milanese College,
and finally rejected by several votes. Then afterwards, when they had
decided to admit me, and when they tried to subject me to certain rules
which placed me on a footing inferior to their own, I compelled them to
grant me full membership. In the case of the Barbiani, after long litigation
and many angry words and much trouble, I came to terms with them; and,
having received the sum of money covenanted by agreement, I was entirely
freed from vexation of the law."[269] Writing generally of his monetary
dealings, Cardan says: "Whenever I may have incurred a loss, I have never
been content merely to retrieve the same, I have always contrived to seize
upon something extra."[270] Or again: "If at any time I have lost twenty
crowns, I have never rested until I have succeeded in getting back these and
twenty more in addition."[271]
Cardan left in his Dicta Familiaria and Præceptorum ad filios Libellus a
long list of aphorisms and counsels, many of which give evidence of keen
insight and busy observation of mankind, while some are distinguished by a
touch of humour rare in his other writings. He bids his children to be careful
how they offend princes, and, offence being given, never to flatter
themselves that it has been pardoned; to live joyfully as long as they can,
for men are for the most part worn out by care; never to take a wife from a
witless stock or one tainted with hereditary disease; to refrain from

deliberating when the mind is disturbed; to learn how to be worsted and
suffer loss; and to trust a school-master to teach children, but not to feed
them. One of the dicta is a gem of quaint wisdom. "Before you begin to
wash your face, see that you have a towel handy to dry the same." If all the
instances of prodigies, portents, visions, and mysterious warnings which
Cardan has left on record were set down in order, a perusal of this catalogue
would justify, if it did not compel, the belief that he was little better than a
credulous fool, and raise doubts whether such a man could have written
such orderly and coherent works as the treatise on Arithmetic, or the book
of the Great Art. But Cardan was beyond all else a man of moods, and it
would be unfair to figure as his normal mental condition those periods of
overwrought nervousness and the hallucinations they brought with them. In
his old age the nearness of the inevitable stroke, and the severance of all
earthly ties, led him to discipline his mind into a calmer mood, but early
and late during his season of work his nature was singularly sensitive to the
wearing assaults of cares and calamities. In crises of this kind his mind
would be brought into so morbid a condition, that it would fall entirely
under the sway of any single idea then dominant; such idea would master
him entirely, or even haunt him like one of those unclean spectres he
describes with such gusto in the De Varietate. What he may have uttered
when these moods were upon him must not be taken seriously; these are the
moments to which the major part of his experiences of things supra
naturam may be referred. But there are numerous instances in which he
describes marvellous phenomena with philosophic calm, and examines
them in the true spirit of scepticism. In his account of the trembling of the
bed on which he lay the night before he heard of Gian Battista's marriage,
he goes on to say that a few nights after the first manifestation, he was once
more conscious of a strange movement; and, having put his hand to his
breast, found that his heart was palpitating violently because he had been
lying on his left side. Then he remembered that a similar physical trouble
had accompanied the first trembling of the bed, and admits that this
manifestation may be referred to a natural cause, i.e. the palpitation. He
tells also how he found amongst his father's papers a record of a cure of the
gout by a prayer offered to the Virgin at eight in the morning on the first of
April, and how he duly put up the prayer and was cured of the gout, but he
adds: "Sed in hoc, auxiliis etiam artis usus sum."[272] Again with regard to
the episode of the ignition of his bed twice in the same night, without

visible cause, he says that this portent may have come about by some
supernatural working; but that, on the other hand, it may have been the
result of mere chance. He tells another story of an experience which befell
him when he was in Belgium.[273] He was aroused early in the morning by
the noise made outside his door by a dog catching fleas. Having got out of
bed to see to this, he heard the sound as of a key being softly put into the
lock. He told this fact to the servants, who at once took up the tale, and
persuaded themselves that they had heard many noises of the same kind,
and others vastly more wonderful; in short, the whole house was swarming
with apparitions. The next night the noise was repeated, and a second
observation laid bare the real cause thereof. The scratching of the dog had
caused the bolt to fall into the socket, and this produced the noise which had
disquieted him. He writes in conclusion: "Thus many events which seem to
defy all explanation have really come to pass by accident, or in the course
of nature. Out of such manifestations as these the unlettered, the
superstitious, the timorous, and the over-hasty make for themselves
miracles."[274] Again, after telling a strange story of a boy who beheld the
image of a thief in the neck of a phial, and of some incantations of Josephus
Niger, he concludes: "Nevertheless I am of opinion that all these things
were fables, and that no one could have had any real knowledge thereof,
seeing that they were nothing else than vain triflings."[275]
In a nature so complex and many-sided as Cardan's, strange resemblances
may be sought for and discovered, and it certainly is an unexpected
revelation to find a mental attitude common to Cardan, a man tied and
bound by authority and the traditions of antiquity, and such a daring
assailant of the schools and of Aristotle as Doctor Joseph Glanvil. The
conclusions of Cardan as to certain obscure phenomena recently cited show
that, in matters lying beyond sensual cognition, he kept an open mind. In
summing up the case of the woman said to have been cured by the
incantations of Josephus Niger, he says that she must have been cured either
by the power of the imagination, or by the agency of the demons. Here he
anticipates the arguments which Glanvil sets forth in Sadducismus
Triumphatus. Writing on the belief in witchcraft Glanvil says, "We have the
attestation of thousands of eye and ear witnesses, and these not of the
easily-deceivable vulgar only, but of wise and grave discerners; and that
when no interest could oblige them to agree together in a common Lye. I

say, we have the light of all these circumstances to confirm us in the belief
of things done by persons of despicable power and knowledge, beyond the
reach of Art and ordinary Nature. Standing public Records have been kept
of these well-attested Relations, and Epochas made of those unwonted
events. Laws in many Nations have been enacted against those vile
practices; those amongst the Jews and our own are notorious; such cases
have often been determined near us by wise and reverend Judges, upon
clear and convictive Evidence; and thousands of our own Nation have
suffered death for their vile compacts with Apostate spirits. All these I
might largely prove in their particular instances, but that 'tis not needful
since these did deny the being of Witches, so it was not out of ignorance of
these heads of Argument, of which probably they have heard a thousand
times; but from an apprehension that such a belief is absurd, and the things
impossible. And upon these presumptions they condemn all demonstrations
of this nature, and are hardened against conviction. And I think those that
can believe all Histories and Romances; That all the wiser would have
agreed together to juggle mankind into a common belief of ungrounded
fables, that the sound senses of multitudes together may deceive them, and
Laws are built upon Chimeras; That the greatest and wisest Judges have
been Murderers, and the sagest persons Fools, or designing Impostors; I say
those that can believe this heap of absurdities, are either more credulous
than those whose credulity they reprehend; or else have some extraordinary
evidence of their perswasion, viz.: That it is absurd and impossible that
there should be a Witch or Apparition."[276] Cardan's argument in the case
of the sick woman, that it would be difficult if not impossible to invent
cause for her cure, other than the power of imagination or Demoniac
agency, if less emphatic and lengthy than Glanvil's, certainly runs upon
parallel lines therewith, and suggests, if it does not proclaim, the existence
of such a thing as the credulity of unbelief; in other words that those who
were disposed to brush aside the alternative causes of the cure as set down
by him, and search for others, and put faith in them, would be fully as
credulous as those who held the belief which he recorded as his own.

FOOTNOTES:
[248] De Varietate, p. 314.

[249] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxvii. p. 115.
[250] "Musicam, sed hanc anno post VI. scilicet MDLXXIV. correxi et transcribi
curavi."—De Vita Propria, ch. xlv. p. 176.
[251] This is on p. 164.
[252] Page 266.
[253] Judicium de Cardano.
[254] Page 57.
[255] "Ita nostra ætate, lapsi sunt clarissimi alioqui viri in hoc genere. Budæus
adversus Erasmum, Fuchsius adversus Cornarium, Silvius adversus Vesalium,
Nizolius adversus Maioragium: non tam credo justis contentionum causis, quam
vanitate quadam et spe augendæ opinionis in hominibus."—Opera, tom. i. p.
135.
[256] He writes in this strain in De Vita Propria, ch. xiv. p. 49, in De Varietate
Rerum, p. 626, and in Geniturarum Exempla, p. 431.
[257] On the subject of dissimulation Cardan writes: "Assuevi vultum in
contrarium semper efformare; ideo simulare possum, dissimulare nescio."—De
Vita Propria, ch. xiii. p. 42. Again in Libellus Præceptorum ad filios (Opera,
tom. i. p. 481), "Nolite unquam mentiri, sed circumvenire [circumvenite?]."
[258] Discoverie of Witchcraft, ch. xi.
[259] Donato Lanza, the druggist, who had been his first introducer to Sfondrato,
was equally perverse. After Cardan had cured him of phthisis, he jumped out of
a window to avoid arrest, and fell into a fish-pond, and died of the cold he took.
—Opera, tom. i. p. 83.
[260] Opera, tom. i. p. 136.
[261] De Vita Propria, ch. x. p. 32.
[262] The Materia Medica of Mesua, dating from the eleventh century, was used
by the London College of Physicians in framing their Pharmacopœia in 1618.
[263] In 1443 a copy of Celsus was found at Milan; Paulus Ægineta was
discovered a little later.
[264] Opera, tom. ix. p. 1.
[265] De Immortalitate Animorum (Lyons, 1545), p. 73. De Varietate, p. 77.
Opera, tom. i. p. 135.
[266] De Subtilitate, p. 445.
[267] "Galen's great complaint against the Peripatetics or Aristotelians, was that
while they discoursed about Anatomy they could not dissect. He met an
argument with a dissection or an experiment. Come and see for yourselves, was
his constant cry."—Harveian Oration, Dr. J.F. Payne, 1896.
[268] Opera, tom. x. p. 462.

[269] De Vita Propria, ch. xxviii. p. 73.
[270] Ibid., ch. xxiii. p. 64.
[271] De Utilitate, p. 309. He also writes at length in the Proxenata on Domestic
Economy.—Chapter xxxvii. et seq. Opera, tom. i. p. 377.
[272] De Vita Propria, ch. xxxvii. p. 118.
[273] De Varietate, p. 589.
[274] De Varietate, p. 589.
[275] Ibid., p. 640.
[276] Sadducismus Triumphatus (Ed. 1682), p. 4.

CHAPTER XV
When dealing with Cardan's sudden incarceration in 1570, in the chronicle
of his life, it was assumed that his offence must have been some spoken or
written words upon which a charge of impiety might have been fastened.
Leaving out of consideration the fiery zeal of the reigning Pope Pius V., it is
hard to determine what plea could have been found for a serious charge of
this nature. Cardan's work had indeed passed the ecclesiastical censors in
1562; but in the estimation of Pius V. the smallest lapse from the letter of
orthodoxy would have seemed grave enough to send to prison, and perhaps
to death, a man as deeply penetrated with the spirit of religion as Cardan
assuredly was. One of his chief reasons for refusing the King of Denmark's
generous offer was the necessity involved of having to live amongst a
people hostile to the Catholic religion; and, in writing of his visit to the
English Court, he declares that he was unwilling to recognize the title of
King Edward VI., inasmuch as by so doing he might seem to prejudice the
rights of the Pope.[277] In spite of this positive testimony, and the absence of
any utterances of manifest heresy, divers writers in the succeeding century
classed him with the unbelievers. Dr. Samuel Parker in his Tractatus de
Deo, published in 1678, includes him amongst the atheistical philosophers;
but a perusal of the Doctor's remarks leaves the reader unconvinced as to
the justice of such a charge. The term Atheism, however, was at this time
used in the very loosest sense, and was even applied to disbelievers in the
apostolical succession.[278] Dr. Parker writes, "Another cause which acted,
together with the natural disposition of Cardan, to produce that odd mixture
of folly and wisdom in him, was his habit of continual thinking by which
the bile was absorbed and burnt up; he suffered neither eating, pleasure, nor
pain to interrupt the course of his thoughts. He was well acquainted with the
writings of all the ancients—nor did he just skim over the heads and
contents of books as some do who ought not to be called learned men, but
skilful bookmongers. Every author that Cardan read (and he read nearly all)
he became intimately acquainted with, so that if any one disputing with
him, quoted the authority of the ancients, and made any the least slip or
mistake, he would instantly set them right." Dr. Parker is as greatly amazed

at the mass of work he produced, as at his powers of accumulation, and
maintains that Cardan believed he was endowed with a faculty which he
calls repræsentatio, through which he was able to apprehend things without
study, "by means of an interior light shining within him. From which you
may learn the fact that he had studied with such enduring obstinacy that he
began to persuade himself that the visions which appeared before him in
these fits and transports of the mind, were the genuine inspirations of the
Deity." This is evidently Dr. Parker's explanation of the attendant demon,
and he ends by declaring that Cardan was rather fanatic than infidel.
Mention has been made of the list of his vices and imperfections which
Cardan wrote down with his own hand. Out of such a heap of self-
accusation it would have been an easy task for some meddlesome enemy to
gather up a plentiful selection of isolated facts which by artful combination
might be so arranged as to justify a formal charge of impiety. The most
definite of these charges were made by Martin del Rio,[279] who declares
that Cardan once wrote a book on the Mortality of the Soul which he was
wont to exhibit to his intimate friends. He did not think it prudent to print
this work, but wrote another, taking a more orthodox view, called De
Immortalitate Animorum. Another assailant, Theophile Raynaud, asserts
that certain passages in this book suggest, if they do not prove, that Cardan
did not set down his real opinions on the subject in hand. Raynaud ends by
forbidding the faithful to read any of Cardan's books, and describes him as
"Homo nullius religionis ac fidei, et inter clancularios atheos secundi
ordinis ævo suo facile princeps." Of all Cardan's books the De
Immortalitate Animorum is the one in which materials for a charge of
impiety might most easily be found. It was put together at a time when he
had had very little practice in the Greek tongue, and it is possible that many
of his conclusions may be drawn from premises only imperfectly
apprehended. Scaliger in his Exercitations seizes upon one passage[280]
which, according to his rendering, implied that Cardan reckoned the
intelligence of men and beasts to be the same in essence, the variety of
operation being produced by the fact that the apprehensive faculty was
inherent in the one, and only operative upon the other from without. But all
through this book it is very difficult to determine whether the propositions
advanced are Cardan's own, or those of the Greek and Arabian writers he
quotes so freely: and this charge of Scaliger, which is the best supported of

all, goes very little way to convict him of impiety. In the De Vita Propria
there are several passages[281] which suggest a belief akin to that of the
Anima Mundi; he had without doubt made up his mind that this work
should not see the light till he was beyond the reach of Pope or Council.
The origin of this charge of impiety may be referred with the best show of
probability to his attempt to cast the horoscope of Jesus Christ.[282] This,
together with a diagram, is given in the Commentaries on Ptolemy, and
soon after it appeared it was made the occasion of a fierce attack by Julius
Cæsar Scaliger, who declared that such a scheme must be flat blasphemy,
inasmuch as the author proved that all the actions of Christ necessarily
followed the position of the stars at the time of His nativity. If Scaliger had
taken the trouble to glance at the Commentary he would have discovered
that Cardan especially guarded himself against any accusation of this sort,
by setting down that no one was to believe he had any intention of asserting
that Christ's divinity, or His miracles, or His holy life, or the promulgation
of His laws were in any way influenced by the stars.[283] Naudé, in
recording the censures of De Thou, "Verum extremæ amentiæ fuit, imo
impiæ audaciæ, astrorum commentitiis legibus verum astrorum dominum
velle subjicere. Quod ille tamen exarata Servatoris nostri genitura fecit,"
and of Joseph Scaliger, "impiam dicam magis, an jocularem audaciam quæ
et dominum stellarum stellis subjecerit, et natum eo tempore putarit, quod
adhuc in lite positum est, ut vanitas cum impietate certaret,"[284] declares
that it was chiefly from the publication of this horoscope that Cardan
incurred the suspicion of blasphemy; but, with his free-thinking bias,
abstains from adding his own censure. He rates Scaliger for ignorance
because he was evidently under the impression that Cardan was the first to
draw a horoscope of Christ, and attacks Cardan chiefly on the score of
plagiary. He records how divers writers in past times had done the same
thing. Albumasar, one of the most learned of the Arabs, whose thema
natalium is quoted by Roger Bacon in one of his epistles to Clement V.,
Albertus Magnus, Peter d'Ailly the Cardinal of Cambrai, and Tiberius
Russilanus who lived in the time of Leo X., all constructed nativities of
Christ, but Cardan makes no mention of these horoscopists, and, according
to the view of Naudé, poses as the inventor of this form of impiety, and is
consequently guilty of literary dishonesty, a worse sin, in his critics' eyes,
than the framing of the horoscope itself.

That there was in Cardan's practice enough of curiosity and independence to
provoke suspicion of his orthodoxy in the minds of the leaders of the post-
Tridentine revival, is abundantly possible; but there is nothing in all his life
and works to show that he was, according to the standard of every age,
anything else than a spiritually-minded man.[285] It would be hard to find
words more instinct with the true feeling of piety, than the following taken
from the fifty-third chapter of the De Vita Propria,—"I love solitude, for I
never seem to be so entirely with those who are especially dear to me as
when I am alone. I love God and the spirit of good, and when I am by
myself I let my thoughts dwell on these, their immeasurable beneficence;
the eternal wisdom, the source and origin of clearest light, that true joy
within us which never fears that God will forsake us; that groundwork of
truth; that willing love; and the Maker of us all, who is blessed in Himself,
and likewise the desire and safeguard of all the blessed. Ah, what depth and
what height of righteousness, mindful of the dead and not forgetting the
living. He is the Spirit who protects me by His commands, my good and
merciful counsellor, my helper and consoler in misfortune."
Two or three of Cardan's treatises are in the materna lingua, but he wrote
almost entirely in Latin, using a style which was emphatically literary.[286]
His Latin is probably above the average excellence of the age, and if the
classic writers held the first place in his estimation—as naturally they
would—he assuredly did not neglect the firstfruits of modern literature.
Pulci was his favourite poet. He evidently knew Dante and Boccaccio well,
and his literary insight was clear enough to perceive that the future
belonged to those who should write in the vulgar tongue of the lands which
produced them.[287]
Perhaps it was impossible that a man endowed with so catholic a spirit and
with such earnest desire for knowledge, should sink into the mere pedant
with whom later ages have been made acquainted through the farther
specialization of science. At all events Cardan is an instance that the man of
liberal education need not be killed by the man of science. For him the path
of learning was not an easy one to tread, and, as it not seldom happens,
opposition and coldness drove him on at a pace rarely attained by those for
whom the royal road to learning is smoothed and prepared. For a long time
his father refused to give him instruction in Latin, or to let him be taught by

any one else, and up to his twentieth year he seems to have known next to
nothing of this language which held the keys both of letters and science. He
began to learn Greek when he was about thirty-five, but it was not till he
had turned forty that he took up the study of it in real earnest;[288] and,
writing some years later, he gives quotations from a Latin version of
Aristotle.[289] In his commentaries on Hippocrates he used a Latin text,
presumably the translation of Calvus printed in Rome in 1525, and quotes
Epicurus in Latin in the De Subtilitate (p. 347), but in works like the De
Sapientia and the De Consolatione he quotes Greek freely, supplying in
nearly every case a Latin version of the passages cited. These treatises
bristle with quotations, Horace being his favourite author. "Vir in omni
sapientiæ genere admirandus."[290] As with many moderns his love for
Horace did not grow less as old age crept on, for the De Vita Propria is
perhaps fuller of Horatian tags than any other of his works. It would seem
somewhat of a paradox that a sombre and earnest nature like Cardan's
should find so great pleasure in reading the elegant poco curante triflings of
the Augustan singer, were it not a recognized fact that Horace has always
been a greater favourite with serious practical Englishmen than with the
descendants of those for whom he wrote his verses.
It was a habit with Cardan to apologize in the prefaces of his scientific
works for the want of elegance in his Latin, explaining that the baldness and
simplicity of his periods arose from his determination to make his meaning
plain, and to trouble nothing about style for the time being; but the
following passage shows that he had a just and adequate conception of the
necessary laws of literary art. "That book is perfect which goes straight to
its point in one single line of argument, which neither leaves out aught that
is necessary, nor brings in aught that is superfluous: which observes the rule
of correct division; which explains what is obscure; and shows plainly the
groundwork upon which it is based."[291]
The De Vita Propria from which this extract comes is in point of style one
of his weakest books, but even in this volume passages may here and there
be found of considerable merit, and Cardan was evidently studious to let his
ideas be presented in intelligible form, for he records that in 1535 he read
through the whole of Cicero, for the sake of improving his Latin. His style,
according to Naudé, held a middle place between the high-flown and the

pedestrian, and of all his books the De Utilitate ex Adversis Capienda,
which was begun in 1557, shows the nearest approach to elegance, but even
this is not free from diffuseness, the fault which Naudé finds in all his
writings. Long dissertations entirely alien from the subject in hand are
constantly interpolated. In the Practice of Arithmetic he turns aside to treat
of the marvellous properties of certain numbers, of the motion of the
planets, and of the Tower of Babel; and in the treatise on Dialectic he gives
an estimate of the historians and letter-writers of the past. But here Cardan
did not sin in ignorance; his poverty and not his will consented to these
literary outrages. He was paid for his work by the sheet, and the thicker the
volume the higher the pay.[292]
When he made a beginning of the De Utilitate Cardan was at the zenith of
his fortunes. He had lately returned from his journey to Scotland, having
made a triumphant progress through the cities of Western Europe. Thus,
with his mind well stored with experience of divers lands, his wits
sharpened by intercourse with the élite of the learned world, and his hand
nerved by the magnetic stimulant of success, he sat down to write as the
philosopher and man of the world, rather than as the man of science. He
was, in spite of his prosperity, inclined to deal with the more sombre side of
life. He seems to have been specially drawn to write of death, disease, and
of the peculiar physical misfortune which befell him in early manhood.
Like Cicero he goes on to treat of Old Age, but in a spirit so widely
different that a brief comparison of the conclusions of the two philosophers
will not be without interest. Old age, Cardan declares to be the most cruel
and irreparable evil with which man is cursed, and to talk of old age is to
talk of the crowning misfortune of humanity. Old men are made wretched
by avarice, by dejection, and by terror. He bids men not to be deceived by
the flowery words of Cicero,[293] when he describes Cato as an old man,
like to a fair statue of Polycleitus, with faculties unimpaired and memory
fresh and green. He next goes on to catalogue the numerous vices and
deformities of old age, and instances from Aristotle what he considers to be
the worst of all its misfortunes, to wit that an old man is well-nigh cut off
from hope; and by way of comment grimly adds, "If any man be plagued by
the ills of old age he should blame no one but himself, for it is by his own
choice that his life has run on so long." He vouchsafes a few words of
counsel as to how this hateful season may be robbed of some of its horror.

Our bodies grow old first, then our senses, then our minds. Therefore let us
store our treasures in that part of us which will hold out longest, as men in a
beleaguered city are wont to collect their resources in the citadel, which,
albeit it must in the end be taken, will nevertheless be the last to fall into the
foeman's hands. Old men should avoid society, seeing that they can bring
nothing thereto worth having: whether they speak or keep silent they are in
the way, and they are as irksome to themselves when they are silent, as they
are to others when they speak. The old man should take a lesson from the
lower animals, which are wont to defend themselves with the best arms
given them by nature: bulls with their horns, horses with their hoofs, and
cats with their claws; wherefore an old man should at least show himself to
be as wise as the brutes and maintain his position by his wisdom and
knowledge, seeing that all the grace and power of his manhood must needs
have fled.[294]
In another of his moral treatises he has formulated a long indictment against
old age, that hateful state with its savourless joys and sleepless nights. Did
not Zeno the philosopher strangle himself when he found that time refused
to do its work. The happiest are those who earliest lay down the burden of
existence, and the Law itself causes these offenders who are least guilty to
die first, letting the more nefarious and hardened criminals stand by and
witness the death of their fellows. There can be no evil worse than the daily
expectation of the blow that is inevitable, and old age, when it comes, must
make every man regret that he did not die in infancy. "When I was a boy,"
he writes, "I remember one day to have heard my mother, Chiara Micheria
—herself a young woman—cry out that she wished it had been God's will
to let her die when she was a child. I asked her why, and she answered:
'Because I know I must soon die, to the great peril of my soul, and besides
this, if we shall diligently weigh and examine all our experiences of life, we
shall not light upon a single one which will not have brought us more
sorrow than joy. For afflictions when they come mar the recollection of our
pleasures, and with just cause; for what is there in life worthy the name of
delight, the ever-present burden of existence, the task of dressing and
undressing every day, hunger, thirst, evil dreams? What more profit and
ease have we than the dead? We must endure the heat of summer, the cold
of winter, the confusion of the times, the dread of war, the stern rule of
parents, the anxious care of our children, the weariness of domestic life, the

ill carriage of servants, lawsuits, and, what is worst of all, the state of the
public mind which holds probity as silliness; which practises deceit and
calls it prudence. Craftsmen are counted excellent, not by their skill in their
art, but by reason of their garish work and of the valueless approbation of
the mob. Wherefore one must needs either incur God's displeasure or live in
misery, despised and persecuted by men.'"[295] These words, though put into
his mother's mouth, are manifestly an expression of Cardan's own feelings.
Cardan was the product of an age to which there had recently been revealed
the august sources from which knowledge, as we understand the term, has
flowed without haste or rest since the unsealing of the fountain. He counts it
rare fortune to have been born in such an age, and rhapsodizes over the
flowery meadow of knowledge in which his generation rejoices, and over
the vast Western world recently made known. Are not the artificial
thunderbolts of man far more destructive than those of heaven? What praise
is too high for the magnet which leads men safely over perilous seas, or for
the art of printing? Indeed it needs but little more to enable man to scale the
very heavens. With his mind thus set upon the exploration of these new
fields of knowledge; with the full realization how vast was the treasure
lying hid therein; it was only natural that a spirit so curious and greedy of
fresh mental food should have fretted at the piteous brevity of the earthly
term allowed to man, and have rated as a supreme evil that old age which
brought with it decay of the faculties and foreshadowed the speedy and
inevitable fall of the curtain. Cicero on the other hand had been nurtured in
a creed and philosophy alike outworn. The blight of finality had fallen upon
the moral world, and the physical universe still guarded jealously her
mighty secrets. To the eyes of Cicero the mirror of nature was blank void
and darkness, while Cardan, gazing into the same glass, must have been
embarrassed with the number and variety of the subjects offered, and may
well have felt that the longest life of man ten times prolonged would rank
but as a moment in that Titanic spell of work necessary to bring to the birth
the teeming burden with which the universe lay in travail. Here is one and
perhaps the strongest reason of his hatred of old age; because through the
shortness of his span of time he could only deal with a grain or two of the
sand lying upon the shores of knowledge. Cicero, with his more limited
vision, conscious that sixty years or so of life would exhaust every physical
delight, and blunt and mar the intellectual; ignorant both of the world of

new light lying beyond the void, and of the rapture which the conquering
investigator of the same must feel in wringing forth its secrets, welcomed
the gathering shades as friendly visitants, a mood which has asserted itself
in later times with certain weary spirits, sated with knowledge as Vitellius
was sated with his banquets of nightingales' tongues.
Cardan with all his curiosity and restless mental activity was hampered and
restrained in his explorations by the bonds which had been imposed upon
thought during the rule of authority. These bonds held him back—acting
imperceptibly—as they held back Abelard and many other daring spirits
trained in the methods of the schoolmen, and allowed him to do little more
than range at large over the fields of fresh knowledge which were destined
to be reaped by later workers trained in other schools and under different
masters. Learning was still subject to authority, though in milder degree,
than when Thomas of Aquino dominated the mental outlook of Europe, and
the great majority of the men who posed as Freethinkers, and sincerely
believed themselves to be Freethinkers, were unconsciously swayed by the
associations of the method of teaching they professed to despise. Their
progress for the most part resembled the movement of a squirrel in a
rotatory cage, but though their efforts to conquer the new world of
knowledge were vain, it cannot be questioned that the restrictions placed
around them, while nullifying the result of their investigations, stimulated
enormously the activity of the brain and gave it a formal discipline which
proved of the highest value when the real literary work of Modern Europe
began. The futilities of the problems upon which the scholastic thinkers
exercised themselves gave occasion for the satiric onslaught both of
Rabelais and Erasmus. "Quæstio subtilissima, utrum Chimæra in vacuo
bombinans possit comedere secundas intentiones; et fuit debatuta per decem
hebdomadas in Consilio Constantiensi," and "Quid consecrasset Petrus, si
consecrasset eo tempore, quo corpus Christi pendebet in cruce?" are
samples which will be generally familiar, but the very absurdity of these
exercitations serves to prove how strenuous must have been the temper of
the times which preferred to exhaust itself over such banalities as are
typified by the extracts above written, rather than remain inactive. The
dogmas in learning were fixed as definitely as in religion, and the solution
of every question was found and duly recorded. The Philosopher was

allowed to strike out a new track, but if he valued his life or his ease, he
would take care to arrive finally at the conclusion favoured by authority.
Cardan may with justice be classed both with men of science and men of
letters. In spite of the limitations just referred to it is certain that as he
surveyed the broadening horizon of the world of knowledge, he must have
felt the student's spasm of agony when he first realized the infinity of
research and the awful brevity of time. His reflections on old age give proof
enough of this. If he missed the labour in the full harvest-field, the glimpse
of the distant mountain tops, suffused for the first time by the new light, he
missed likewise the wearing labour which fell upon the shoulders of those
who were compelled by the new philosophy to use new methods in
presenting to the world the results of their midnight research. Such work as
Cardan undertook in the composition of his moral essays, and in the
Commentary on Hippocrates put no heavy tax on the brain or the vital
energies; the Commentary was of portentous length, but it was not much
more than a paraphrase with his own experiences added thereto.
Mathematics were his pastime, to judge by the ease and rapidity with which
he solved the problems sent to him by Francesco Sambo of Ravenna and
others.[296] He worked hard no doubt, but as a rule mere labour inflicts no
heavier penalty than healthy fatigue. The destroyer of vital power and
spring is hard work, combined with that unsleeping diligence which must
be exercised when a man sets himself to undertake something more
complex than the mere accumulation of data, when he is forced to keep his
mental powers on the strain through long hours of selection and co-
ordination, and to fix and concentrate his energies upon the task of
compelling into symmetry the heap of materials lying under his hand. The
De Subtilitate and the De Varietate are standing proofs that Cardan did not
overstrain his powers by exertion of this kind.
Leaving out of the reckoning his mathematical treatises, the vogue enjoyed
by Cardan's published works must have been a short one. They came to the
birth only to be buried in the yawning graves which lie open in every
library. At the time when Spon brought out his great edition in ten folio
volumes in 1663, the mists of oblivion must have been gathering around the
author's fame, and in a brief space his words ceased to have any weight in
the teaching of that Art he had cultivated with so great zeal and affection.
The mathematician who talked about "Cardan's rule" to his pupils was most