102 JEROME CAKDAN. 



was, in fact, not more than forty-six ; he was a pale, lean 

 man, who loved his study and his wife. He had come to 

 Paris, when he was past the heyday of his youth, from 

 Clermont in Picardy, to study rhetoric and philosophy. 

 After two years he was offered a professorship of logic, but 

 he desired to learn and not to teach. He gave up all the 

 pleasures of the capital, and withdrew himself entirely 

 from mere complimentary society to study Cicero, Pliny, 

 and Aristotle, and to perfect himself in mathematics. He 

 was then teaching philosophy in the College of St. Barbe. 

 By the time he had attained great skill in mathematics he 

 had so much weakened his health that it became necessary 

 for him to retire into the country. "With restored health 

 he returned to town, received fresh lessons in oratory, and 

 resumed the study of elegant literature and of mathematics. 

 He was by that time married, and his wife, objecting to 

 the cost incurred for instruments by reason of his mathe- 

 matical pursuits, he gave them up, good husband as he 

 was, and undertook to earn money instead of spending it. 

 He devoted himself then to medicine, and in that also, by 

 the power and the fineness of his mind, he attained rapidly 

 to eminence. Patients flocked to him, and in his leisure 

 hours he explained Hippocrates and Galen. He was 

 obliged soon, by the great increase of his private practice, 

 to abandon public teaching, but as he found leisure even 

 then to write on Physiology, the students forced him by 



