JEROME CARDAN 157 



humanity as akin to him. There is small reason why 

 we should marvel that he erred now and again ; it is a 

 marvel much greater that he should only have gone 

 astray so seldom and in things of such trifling moment. 

 Indeed I will dare to affirm, and back my opinion with 

 a pledge, that the errors which Scaliger left behind him 

 in these Exercitations were more in number than those 

 which he so wantonly laid to Cardan's charge, having 

 sweated nine years over the task. And this he did not 

 so much in the interests of true erudition as with the 

 desire of coming to blows with all those whom he 

 recognized as the chiefs of learning." 



During the whole dispute Cardan kept his temper 

 admirably. Scaliger was a physician of repute ; and it 

 is not improbable that the spectacle of Cardan's 

 triumphal progress back to Milan from the North may 

 have aroused his jealousy and stimulated him to make 

 his ill-judged attack. But even on the ground of medical 

 science he was no match for Cardan, while in mathe- 

 matics and philosophy he was immeasurably inferior. 

 Cardan felt probably that the attack was nothing more 

 than the buzzing of a gadfly, and that in any case it 

 would make for his own advantage and credit, where- 

 fore he saw no reason why he should disquiet himself ; 

 indeed his attitude of dignified indifference was ad- 

 mirably calculated to win for him the approval of the 

 learned world by the contrast it furnished to the raging 

 fury of his adversary. 1 



After the heavy labour of editing and issuing to the 

 world the De Rerum Varietate, and of re-editing the 



1 Cardan does not seem to have harboured animosity against 

 Scaliger. In the De Vita Propria, ch. xlviii. p. 198, he writes : 

 "Julius Caesar Scaliger plures mihi titulos ascribit, quam ego 

 mihi concedi postulassem, appellans ingenium profundissimum > 

 feUcissimum^ et incomparabile? 



