STUDENT AT PAVIA. 47 



the gates of Pavia. A philosopher who means to be 

 immortal must needs think as well as read and write. 

 Cardan could either think or read while he was fishing. 

 He took out with him also into the woods writing 

 materials, and so studied and worked under the thick 

 green leaves, among the wild flowers, throughout the 

 summer afternoon, dreaming ambitious dreams, and fairly 

 striving to fulfil his best desires. At sunset he returned 

 into the town, where his behaviour was not always 

 orderly. Dice and the draught-board had their charms 

 for him ; a restless night spent wandering about the streets 

 after a day of music was, in his view, a simple kind of 

 relaxation. In this way Cardan worked hard, and made 

 rapid progress. Having embraced medicine as his profes- 

 sion, he had begun a treatise on the DifFerings of Doctors 1 . 

 In the year following his second academical course, re- 

 maining at home in Milan because the presence of war 

 caused the schools of Pavia to be closed 2 , he wrote fifty 

 sheets of mathematical Commentaries. These sheets, I may 

 here add, he lent to Ottaviano Scoto : Ottaviano lost them. 

 Jerome Cardan had embraced medicine as his profes- 

 sion. What was to become, then, of the stipend of the 

 hundred scudi ? He had thrown it aside as dust in the 

 balance of his thoughts. The choice of a profession was not 





1 De Sapientia, &c. &c. p. 420. 



2 " Tertio anno Mediol: mansi bello impeditus, quo ne Academia fre- 

 quentaretur prohibitum est." De Sapientia, &c. p. 421. 



