JEROME CARDAN. 245 



dreams which hardened eventually into a superstition a 

 controlling and as uncontrollable as the attraction of the 

 dice-box. But he had a fine taste for music, he loved the 

 melodious words of Petrarch and Pulci, he read Aristotle 

 and Plotinus for pleasure; and even if the scanty contents 

 of his purse were the products of his gambling skill, they 

 went for no grosser pleasures than expensive writing ma- 

 terials and rare books. Add to this that he was a skillful 

 physician especially for those days and, though blunt 

 in speech, warm-hearted and charitable almost to ex- 

 tremes, and we may safely leave his condemnation to those 

 inerrant moralists who believe that there are no virtues, 

 however great, which the small vices cannot eclipse. 



The dream fancies gradually acquired a stronger hold 

 astrology, first critically examined, became entangled with 

 his faith the casting of a horoscope of Christ brought him 

 perilously near to prison for blasphemy, and a book point- 

 ing out errors in medical practice called down upon him 

 with renewed vigor that uncompromising odium which 

 the elderly medical tortoise, even to this day, especially 

 reserves for the youthful medical hare. The people said 

 he was mad made so by poverty; the inordinate number 

 of printers' errors in his book, which he himself says 

 drove him nearly to distraction would have furnished a 

 more probable reason. 



Thus he lived until nearly forty-five years of age before 

 the tide of his fortunes began to turn. In 1545 he pub- 

 lished his great work on algebra, wherein he laid down 

 rules for all forms and varieties of cubic equations, estab- 

 lished the literal notation, applied this form of mathe- 

 matics to the resolution of geometrical problems, and 

 accomplished other results of great importance, though of 

 too technical a character to be noted here. Up to this 

 time, he had written in all some fifty-three treatises. His 

 success as a physician now began to tell, and resulted in 

 his Milan brethren, after twelve years of denial, giving 

 him the stamp of regularity. The rapidity of his rise was 



