44 JEROME CARDAN. 



Jerome Cardan, therefore, being as well or as ill-fitted 

 for the career lie sought as may be supposed of a youth 

 minded as he was, and troubled as he was with fleshly 

 ailments, set out at the age of nineteen for Pavia, provided 

 in an ungrudging way by his father with respectable re- 

 sources 1 . So far as studies were concerned, the exact 

 curriculum of his preparatory education may be briefly 

 told. In addition to reading and writing, Fazio had 

 taught him rudiments of arithmetic when he was a little 

 boy, and had instructed him, when he was nine years old, 

 in some of the world's mysteries, magical lore very pro- 

 bably, whence obtained Jerome never discovered. Soon 

 afterwards the geometrician taught his son some principles 

 of Arabian astrology, a kind of study that must have done 

 much to confirm the little fellow's dreaminess of nature, 

 and then finding that his recollection of dry facts was 

 bad, endeavoured to instil into him a system of artificial 

 memory, in which endeavours he did not succeed 2 . After 

 Jerome's twelfth year, he had been taught to say by heart 

 the first six books of Euclid, not to understand them, and 

 he had been aided carelessly with a few books and scanty 

 verbal information and advice in the study of geometry 

 and dialectics 3 . At the cost of his mother, who had a 



1 " Honesto cum viatico." De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 429. 



- De Vita Propr. cap, xxxiv. p. 155. De Ut. ex Adv. Cap. p. 428. 



3 "Pater jam ante concesserat ut Geometric et Dialectic opera 

 darem, in quo quanquam praeter paucas admonitiones, librosque, ac 

 licentiam, nullum alium auxilium praebuerit." De Consol. p. 75. 



