126 JEROME CARDAN. 



them as attractive as he could. With this view he occa- 

 sionally substituted geography for the less popular details 

 of geometry, and lectured upon architecture instead of 

 arithmetic 1 . The mind of Cardan being thus set actively 

 to work upon five subjects, was soon engaged on books 

 allied to them in character ; and five works were reckoned 

 afterwards by the philosopher himself as the direct result 

 of the appointment now in question. 



Jerome then was in this way established with a slender 

 income. Among the discouragements that pressed upon 

 him from all sides in Milan, he had not lost faith in his 

 future. He was thirty-three years old. He had been 

 practising medicine for eight years, and had found him- 

 self at the end of that term, without patients and without 

 character as a physician, utterly poor. He had been 

 writing books from boyhood. Some of his manuscripts 

 had been read by a few educated friends, and by one or 

 two of them appreciated; others had perished through 

 domestic mischances, others had been lent and carelessly 

 mislaid, none had been printed. Yet Cardan was curious 

 in pens, and because he regarded them as the keys that 

 would enable him one day to open a door for himself into 

 the temple of Fame, he wrote on with unflagging in- 

 dustry. He breakfasted on barley-bread and water, and 



1 " Ut vero magis audientes allicerem, pro Geometria Geographiam, 

 pro Arithmetica Architectural!! docebam. Ilinc occasio nata conscri- 

 bendi quinque volumina." 



