160 JEROME CARDAN. 



there remained whole little beside his printed work, and 

 the materials belonging to the treatise on arithmetic, 

 which he proposed to publish soon, if possible. 



The work written for D'Avalos on the Arcana of 

 Eternity was kept afterwards unpublished by the 

 Church, but Cardan himself liked it, and quotes the 

 headings of the chapters 1 . The work would have been a 

 curiosity had it come down to us ; only a fragment, how- 

 ever, is preserved. It was divided into seven books. 

 The first treated of God and the origin of what we 

 should call the Cosmos the number of worlds and their 

 magnitude. The second book discussed the constitution 

 of the divine world which was called intelligible, or im- 

 material ; the third was on the constitution of the sensible 

 or material world ; the fourth book was on the order of 

 human things; the fifth on the succession of things 

 natural; the sixth on the succession of things human; and 

 the seventh on the end of the world to which those suc- 

 cessions lead. The subjects of the chapters in each book 

 are communicated to us, but it will suffice here to quote, 

 by way of illustration, half a dozen of the heads under 

 which Jerome treated of things human. They were of 

 this kind : On the Likeness between the World and Man 

 and on the Equal Distribution of Parts; on Sense and 

 Memory; on Contemplation; on Numbers; on Virtue 

 1 De Libris Propriis (1557), pp. 4251. 



