172 JEROME CARDAN. 



that it must on no account be printed by his friends at 

 Venice, the brothers Scoto 1 . It must be executed at 

 Milan, under his own anxious supervision. The crabbed- 

 ness of a handwriting loaded with calculations, lines, 

 and numerals, added to the ignorance or carelessness of 

 printers whose sheets could not be submitted to the dis- 

 tant author for correction, would, if he entrusted his work 

 to the Scoti, result in the publication of a jumble infi- 

 nitely more distressing to the reader than his first little 

 work issued from the same press, with its hundreds of 

 errata. Not a shadow of the original treatise would 

 remain ; labour, money, and the hope of fame would so at 

 once be thrown away. Fortunately there was a bookseller 

 in Milan ready to publish the Plat lecturer's arithmetical 

 treatise at his own expense nay, more, ready to pay him 

 something very little, but still something for the copy- 

 right. Jerome Cardan sold, therefore, to Bernardo Calus- 

 cho, for ten crowns 2 , his Practica Arithmetice, and it 

 was imprinted at Milan in the year 1539, by Joannes 

 Antonius Castellioneus, at the expense of the said Bar- 

 nardinus Caluscus. 



To this volume a portrait of its neglected author was 

 prefixed, surrounded by a motto, reminding the unkind 

 Milanese that a prophet is of no esteem in his own 



1 DeLibrisPropriis(1557),p. 41. 



2 De Libris Propr. Lib. ult. Opera, Tom. i. pp. 103, 104. 



