JEROME CARDAN 235 



ments which he proposed to build up out of the vast 

 store of material accumulated in his industrious brain. 

 The literary record of his life in Rome shows that this 

 was no vain saying. He was at work on the later 

 chapters of the De Vita Propria up to the last weeks 

 of his life ; and, scattered about these, there are records 

 of his work of correction and revising. While telling of 

 the books he has lately been engaged with, he wanders 

 off in the same sentence to talk of the dream which 

 urged him to write the De Subtilitate, and of the execu- 

 tion of the Commentarii in Ptolomceum, during his voyage 

 down the Loire. In 1573 he seems to have found the 

 mass of undigested work more than he could bear to 

 behold ; for, after making extracts of such matter as he 

 deemed worth keeping, he consigned to the flames no 

 less than a hundred and twenty of his manuscripts. 1 

 Before leaving Bologna he had put into shape the 

 Proxenata, a lengthy collection of hints, maxims, and re- 

 flections as to everyday life ; he had re-edited the Liber 

 Artis Magna, and had added thereto the treatise De 

 ProportionibuS) and the Regula Aliza, He also took 

 in hand two books on Geometry, and one on Music, and 

 this last he completed in 1574. On November 16, 1574, 

 he records that he is at that moment writing an ex- 

 planation of the more abstruse works of Hippocrates, 

 but that he is yet far from the end of his task. 



In the De Libris Propriis he gives a list of all his 



1 " Qua causa permotus sim ad scribendum, superius intellexisse 

 te existimo, quippe somnio monitus, inde bis, terque, ac quater, ac 

 pluries, ut alias testatus sum ; sed et desiderio perpetuandi nominis. 

 Bis autem magnam copiam ac numerum eorum perdidi ; primum 

 circa XXXVII annum, cum circiter IX. libros exussi, quod 

 vanos ac nullius utilitatis futures esse intelligerem ; anno autem 

 MDLXXIII alios CXX libros, cum jam calamitas ilia cessasset 

 cremavi." De Vita Propriety ch. xlv. pp. 174, 175. 



