16 JEROME CARDAN. 



CHAPTER II. 



LIFE AS A PROFESSOR IN PAVIA CARDAN'S COUNSEL TO HIS CHILDREN. 



THE stipend attached to the professorship at Pavia was 

 liberal. It consisted in the first year of two hundred 

 and forty, and in the year 1547 was increased to four 

 hundred gold crowns 1 . Pavia was the same university 

 which Cardan had first entered as a neglected youth, 

 when at the age of nineteen he escaped from bondage 

 in his father's house. The honours that were at last paid 

 to him there, the profitable medical reputation that ac- 

 crued to him from his prominent position as a teacher of 

 his art, and the wide difference between the actual salary 

 he was receiving, and the few crowns paid to him as a 

 Plat lecturer upon arithmetic, made up a sum of worldly 

 good fortune, so unexpected, that Jerome felt for a time, 

 he says, as though it had been all a dream ! 



Vesalius was perhaps the only medical teacher in Italy 

 who was then able to fill his lecture-room. He had a 

 stimulating subject. His dissections of real human bodies 

 attracted the curious as much as the inquiring. He was a 



1 De Lib. Prop. Lib. ult. Op. Tom. i. p. 108. Geniturarum Exem- 

 plar (ed. Lugd. 1555), p. 80. 



