48 JEROME CARDAN. 



to him a money question. Regarding it, however, even in 

 that light, when his father and Clara pleaded to him the 

 importance of this lectureship, and the honours and 

 emoluments that were to be attained by all good juris- 

 consults, the youth felt that his father's standing in the 

 world was but a bad endorsement of their plea. Juris- 

 prudence, he remarked, had done but little for his father 

 Fazio 1 , though he had been lauded as the knower of all 

 things in that book of his on Peckham's Perspective To 

 that book, and the laudation in it, Jerome refers, noting 

 how very false the praise was, since his father's knowledge 

 was confined to few ideas, and none of those his own. 

 Law studies had contracted his rnind not enlarged it. 

 Eager, therefore, for the best kind of mental cultivation 

 as the basis of his future immortality, the young philoso- 

 pher, after he went to Pavia, was not long in determining 

 that he would never follow in his father's steps. 



Medicine had recommended itself to Cardan as the 

 pursuit most likely to beget a philosophic mind. As a 

 physician, he could not only keep over his own feeble 

 health a reasonable guardianship and he desired long- 

 life but he should also be more fairly on the path to an 

 immortal fame. The studies that belong to medicine, he 

 reasoned 2 , stand upon surer ground than studies that 



1 " Parum ilium etiam absque impedimenta profecisse viderem." De 

 Vit. Propr. cap. x. p. 49. 



2 Nothing could be saner than this reasoning: "In eo instituto a 

 prima aetate mansi, ut vitae consulerem: studia autem medicinse magis 



