,oo MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES. 



condemned as heretical with regard to a number of points, in dealing with 

 which the writer had openly declared himself the partisan of Averroism, a 

 bastard kind of scholasticism which linked the principles of Plato and 

 Aristotle to the vagaries of Albumazar. He was not persecuted, as Roger 

 Bacon and Pietro d'Abano had been, but he voluntarily submitted himself to 

 exile, and found* a peaceful asylum in France, under the protection of the 

 University of Paris, in which he had previously studied the higher sciences, 

 and even cabalism. 



Averroisro, with its attendant mysteries of astrology and magic, con- 

 tinued to reign in the schools of Italy and of Germany, making its baneful 

 influence felt in the exact as well as in the speculative sciences. Its principal 

 centre was the University of Padua. The illustrious Jerome Cardan of 

 Pavia (died in 1576) had begun his career of professor by teaching mathe- 

 matics at Milan, and it was then that he invented a new mode of resolving 

 algebraic equations. But his passion for astrology and the occult sciences 

 soon dragged him into a vicious circle of wild crazes and visions. So it was 

 with Cornelius Agrippa of Netteshcim (born at Cologne in 1486), with 

 Theophrastus Bombastes, surnamed Paracelsus (born at Einsiedlen, in Switzer- 

 land, about 1493), who would have been two great philosophers, two great 

 physicians, and two great mathematicians, if they had not preferred to be 

 astrologers and cabalists ; but, as it was, they lived in poverty, and died in 

 misery, one at the Grenoble Hospital (1535), the other at the Hospital of 

 Salzburg (1541). Another dreamer, who, lika Agrippa and Paracelsus, was 

 a man of universal attainments, and who, like them, visited all the Universities 

 and courts of Europe, Lucilio Vanini, born in the kingdom of Naples, lived 

 as wretched and precarious a life as they did, and came to a still more 

 miserable end. As M. Cousin has remarked, Vanini had no other God than 

 Nature, and his morality was that of Epicurus. He was burnt alive, as an 

 atheist, at Toulouse, upon the 9th of February, 1619. 



France was, however, more hospitable for the astrologers and sorcerers, 

 though the celebrated Pierre La Ramee, surnamed Ramus, Principal of the 

 College of Presles, at Paris, where he himself taught philosophy and mathe- 

 matics in 1545, opened an eloquent campaign against the extravagances of 

 astrology (Fig. 79). But Ramus was one of the apostles of the Reformation, 

 and his philosophic reasoning was no match for the allied forces of madmen 

 and impostors who dishonoured true science. Cosmo Ruggieri, whom 



