DISPUTE CONCERNING LECTURE-ROOMS. 279 



menced, and that up to that time the accommodation for 

 the pupils and professors had been very bad; after that 

 year it was of course no better until the building works 

 had been so far completed as to admit of the opening of 

 a few halls. Out of the difficulty that there was in pro- 

 curing proper lecture- rooms, arose a vexation to Cardan 

 of which he writes as if it had been a conspiracy against 

 him. His enemies, he said 1 , to prevent his room from 

 filling, appointed a time for his lectures upon which 

 followed immediately the dinner-hour, and gave the 

 class-room at the same time, or just before it, to an- 

 other teacher. To him Jerome proposed that he should 

 do one of three things, either begin sooner and end 

 sooner, so that there might remain due time for the suc- 

 ceeding lecture, or that he should find another class-room, 

 or that Cardan should get another class-room, and one 

 of the two be left in sole possession of the room, that 

 could not be conveniently used by them both. By none 

 of these suggestions was the difficulty to be solved ; 

 and therefore at an annual election day Cardan under- 

 took formally to petition that the lecture clashing with 

 his own might be elsewhere delivered. While this 

 quarrel was at its height, the old physician was in 

 other respects full of trouble, surrounded he thought, 

 and in some degree perhaps truly, by conspiracies. 

 1 De Vita Propria, cap. 



UNIVERSITY 



