CARDAN AS PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE. 17 



man of the world too, strong-willed, and perhaps overbear- 

 ing in his temper, but of courteous habits ; young, hand- 

 some, well-dressed, affable, and a fluent speaker, master of 

 an admirable style. Jerome Cardan had nothing in his 

 body calculated to win for his learned expositions of 

 Hippocrates the accident of popularity. He was a sickly 

 man, rather small of stature, thin-armed, narrow-chested, 

 lean, and gouty. His teeth were beginning already to fall 

 out. He was a fair-complexioned man, with yellow hair, 

 having bald protuberant temples, and a luxuriant beard 

 under the chin. The massive temples, indicating as we 

 now say Ideality, indicated as he then said the influence 

 of Taurus at his birth. He had an ugly scar upon his 

 forehead, small grey-blue, weak, short-sighted eyes his 

 left eye, since the first attack of gout, watered habi- 

 tually, and a pendulous lower lip. He was not trim of 

 dress or suave of manner. He had a harsh, abrupt voice, 

 and a slight stutter in his speech ; he stooped when he 

 walked, and was ungainly in his gesture. Furthermore, 

 his whole skin had been subject to an eruption since he 

 wlas twenty-four years old, and did not become sound 

 again till he was fifty-one 1 . 



i This personal description of Cardan is taken partly from the 

 chapter De Vita Propria, and chiefly from the account of himself in 

 the third and longest dissertation on hia own horoscope. Geniturarum 

 Exemplar (ed. Lugd. 1555), pp. 57140. 



VOL. II. C 



