236 JEROME CARDAN 



published works, and likewise a table of the same 

 arranged in the order in which they ought to be read. 

 He apologizes for the imperfect state in which some of 

 them are left, and declares that the sight of his un- 

 finished tasks never fails to awaken in his breast a bitter 

 sense of resentment over that loss which he had never 

 ceased to mourn. " At one time I hoped," he writes, 

 " that these works would be corrected by my son, but 

 this favour you see has been denied to me. The desire 

 of my enemies was not to make an end of him, but of 

 me ; not by gentle means, in sooth, but by cruel open 

 murder ; to let me fall in the very blood of my son." 

 It is somewhat remarkable that in this matter Cardan 

 was destined to suffer a disappointment similar to that 

 which he himself brought upon his own father by refus- 

 ing to qualify himself to become the commentator on 

 Archbishop Peckham's Perspectives. He next gives the 

 names of all those who had commended him in their 

 works, and finds a special cause for gratification in the 

 fact that, out of the long list set down, only four or five 

 were known to him personally, and these not intimately. 

 There is, however, another short list of censors ; and of 

 these he affirms that a certain Brodeus alone is worthy 

 of respect. Of Buteon, who criticized the treatise on 

 Arithmetic, he says : "Est plane stultus et elleboro indiget" 

 Tartaglia's name is there, and he, according to Cardan, 

 was forced to eat his words ; " but he was ashamed to 

 do what he promised, and unwilling to blot out what he 

 had written. He went on in his wrong-headed course, 

 living upon the labour of other men like a greedy crow, 

 a manifest robber of other men's wealth of study ; so 

 impudent that he published as his own, in the Italian 

 tongue, that invention for the raising of sunken ships 

 which I had made known four years before. This he 



