GALEN. 101 



away from the truth, and losing the best sense of the 

 teaching of Hippocrates, as Galen had restored and ampli- 

 fied it. The first attempt, therefore, of Cardan, as a medi- 

 cal author, made in direct imitation of Galen, was a work 

 entitled Contradicentia Medicorum, on that wide sub- 

 ject the Differings of Doctors. The titles of some other of 

 Cardan's works are borrowed from the example of Galen. 

 The list of resemblances is scarcely made complete, when 

 I add that the style of Galen, brilliant, pompous, and dif- 

 fuse, would not pair badly with the style of Cardan, though 

 Cardan, equally diffuse, wrote with less rhetoric and more 

 true genius. Galen was also a prominent example of pro- 

 lific authorship, Cardan himself being no mean proficient 

 in the art of bookmaking. In that respect, however, he was 

 utterly eclipsed by the sage of Pergamus, since it is said of 

 Galen that he wrote seven hundred and fifty books ; five 

 hundred on medicine, and the rest on geometry, phi- 

 losophy, logic, and grammar. Galen wrote two treatises 

 especially upon the books that he had written, and the 

 order in which they were to be taken. Those treatises 

 he called " De Libris Propriis." Cardan wrote three works 

 of precisely the same kind, and gave them the same title. 

 While noting facts like these, it is to be remembered 

 that the imitation of old forms was, in Jerome's time, the 

 highest object of a great deal of the scholarship of Europe, 

 and that Cardan shared many points of the preceding 



