JEROME CARDAN 117 



permanently at Pavia. Moreover at this juncture he seems 

 to have been strongly moved to augment the fame which 

 he had already won in Mathematics and Medicine by 

 some great literary achievement, and he worked dili- 

 gently with this object in view. 1 



At the beginning of November 1551, a letter came to 

 him from Cassanate, 2 a Franco-Spanish physician, who 

 was at that time in attendance upon the Archbishop of 

 St. Andrews, requesting him to make the journey to 

 Paris, and there to meet the Archbishop, who was 

 suffering from an affection of the lungs. The fame of 

 Cardan as a physician had spread as far as Scotland, 

 and the Archbishop had set his heart on consulting him. 

 Cassanate's letter is of prodigious length. After a diffuse 

 exordium he proceeds to praise in somewhat fulsome 

 terms the De Libris Propriis and the treatises De Sapi- 

 entia 3 and De Consolatione, which had been given to him 

 by a friend when he was studying at Toulouse in 1549. 

 He had just read the De Subtilitate, and was inflamed 

 with desire to become acquainted with everything which 

 Cardan had ever written. But what struck Cassanate 

 more than anything was a passage in the De Sapientia 

 on a medical question, which he extracts and incorpor- 

 ates in his epistle. Cardan writes there : " But if my pro- 

 fession itself will not give me a living, nor open out an 

 avenue to some other career, I must needs set my brains 

 to work, to find therein something unknown hitherto, for 

 the charm of novelty is unfailing, something which would 

 prove of the highest utility in a particular case. In Milan, 



1 About this time he wrote the Liber Decent Problematum, and 

 the treatise Delle Burle Calde, one of his few works written in 

 Italian. Opera, torn. i. p. 109. 



2 Cassanate's letter is given in full (Opera, torn. i. p. 89). 



3 The quotation from the De Sapientia differs somewhat from the 

 original passage which stands on p. 578 of the same volume. 



