JEROME CARDAN 275 



Harvey ! Were his claims to immortality to rest en- 

 tirely on his contribution to Medicine, his name would 

 have gone down. to oblivion along with that of Cavenago, 

 Camutio, Delia Croce, and the multitude of jealous 

 rivals who, according to his account, were ever plotting 

 his downfall. But it was rescued from this fate by his 

 excellence as a mathematician, by the interest clinging 

 to his personality, by the enormous range of his learning, 

 by his picturesque reputation as a dreamer of dreams, 

 and a searcher into the secrets of the hidden world. 

 In an age when books were few and ill-composed, his 

 works became widely popular ; because, although he 

 dealt with abstruse subjects, he wrote as even Naud6 

 admits in a passably good style, and handled his sub- 

 ject with a lightness of touch which was then very rare. 

 This was the reason why men went on reading him 

 long after his works had ceased to have any scientific 

 value ; which induced writers like Burton and Sir 

 Thomas Browne to embroider their pages freely with 

 quotations from his works, and thus make his name 

 familiar to many who have never handled a single one 

 of his volumes. 



It is somewhat strange to find running through the 

 complex web of Cardan's character a well-defined thread 

 of worldly wisdom and common-sense ; to find that a man, 

 described by almost every one who has dealt with his 

 character as a credulous simpleton, one with disordered 

 wits, or a down-right madman, should, when occasion 

 demanded, prove himself to be a sharp man of business. 

 When Fazio died he left his son with a number of un- 

 settled law-suits on hand, concerning which he writes : 

 " From my father's death until I was forty-six, that is 

 to say for a space of twenty-three years, I was almost 

 continually involved in law-suits. First with Alessandro 



