JEROME CARDAN 101 



five servants and three horses. This offer I did not 

 accept because the country was very cold and damp, 

 and the people well-nigh barbarians ; moreover the rites 

 and doctrines of religion were quite foreign to those of 

 the Roman Church." l 



Cardan was now forty-six years of age, a mathemati- 

 cian of European fame, and the holder of an honourable 

 post at an ancient university, which he might have 

 exchanged for other employment quite as dignified and 

 far more lucrative. In dealing with a character as 

 bizarre as his, it would be as a rule unprofitable to 

 search deeply for motives of action, but in this instance 

 it is no difficult matter to detect upon the surface 

 several causes which may have swayed him in this 

 decision to remain at Pavia. However firmly he may 

 have set himself to win fame as a physician, he was in 

 no way disposed to put aside those mathematical 

 studies in which he had already made so distinguished 

 a name, nor to abandon his astrology and chiromancy 

 and discursive reading of all kinds. At Pavia he would 

 find leisure for all these, and would in addition be able 

 to make good any arrears of medical and magical 

 knowledge into which he might have fallen during the 

 years so largely devoted to the production of the Book 

 of the Great Art. Moreover, the time in question was 

 one of the prime epochs in the history of the healing 

 art. A new light had just arisen in Vesalius, who had 

 recently published his book, Corporis Humani Fabrica, 

 and was lecturing in divers universities on the new 

 method of Anatomy, the actual dissection of the human 

 body. He went to Pavia in the course of his travels 

 and left traces of his visit in the form of a revived and 

 re-organized school of Anatomy. This fact alone would 

 1 De Vita Propria^ ch. xxxii. p. 99. 



