Jerome Cardan Part 12

[237] "Nolim ego ad trutinam haec sectari, velut Porphyrius, Psellus, Plotinus, Proclus, Jamblicus, qui copiose de his quae non videre, velut historiam natae rei scripserunt."--_De Subtilitate_, p. 540.

[238] _Opera_, tom. i. 672.

CHAPTER XIII

AFTER the accusation brought against him at Milan in 1562, Cardan had been prohibited from teaching or lecturing in that city, and similar disabilities had followed his recent imprisonment at Bologna. At Rome no duties of this kind awaited him, so he had full time to follow his physician's calling after taking up his residence there. He records the cure of a n.o.ble matron, Clementina Ma.s.sa, and of Cesare Buontempo, a jurisconsult, both of whom had been suffering for nearly two years. The circ.u.mstances of his retirement from Bologna would not affect his reputation as a physician, and he seems to have had in Rome as many or even more patients than he cared to treat; and in writing in general terms concerning his successes as a healer, he says: "In all, I restored to health more than a hundred patients, given up as incurable in Milan, in Bologna, and in Rome." Of all the friends Cardan had in this closing period of his life, none was more useful or benevolent than Cardinal Alciati, who, although he had been secretary to Pius IV., contrived to retain the favour of his successor. This piece of good fortune Alciati owed to the protection of Carlo Borromeo, who had been his pupil at Pavia, and had procured for him from Pius IV. a bishopric, a cardinal's hat, and the secretarys.h.i.+p of Dataria. Another of Cardan's powerful friends was the Prince of Matellica, of whom he speaks in terms of praise inflated enough to be ridiculous, were it not for the accompanying note of pathos. After celebrating the almost divine character of this n.o.bleman, his munificence and his superhuman abilities, he goes on: "What could there be in me to win the kindly notice of such a patron? Certainly I had done him no service, nor could he hope I should ever do him any in the future, I, an old man, an outcast of fortune, and prostrated by calamity. In sooth, there was naught about me to attract him; if indeed he found any merit in me, it must have been my uprightness."

Powerful friends are never superfluous, and Cardan seems to have needed them in Rome as much as in Bologna. In 1573 he again hints at plots against his life, but almost immediately after recording his suspicions he goes on to suggest that his danger had arisen chiefly from his ignorance of the streets of Rome, and from the uncouth manners of the populace.

"Many physicians, more cautious than myself, and better versed in the customs of the place, have come by their death from similar cause." The danger, whatever its nature, seems to have threatened him as a member of the practising faculty at Rome rather than as the persecuted ex-teacher of Pavia and Bologna. Rodolfo Sylvestro was not the only one of his former a.s.sociates near him in his old age, for he notes that Simone Sosia, who had been his _famulus_ at Pavia in 1562, was still in his service at Rome.

In reviewing the machinations of his enemies to bring about his dismissal from the Professors.h.i.+p at Bologna, Cardan indulges in the reflection that these men unwillingly did him good service, that is, they procured him leisure which he might use in the completion of his unfinished works, and in the construction of fresh monuments which he proposed to build up out of the vast store of material acc.u.mulated in his industrious brain. The literary record of his life in Rome shows that this was no vain saying. He was at work on the later chapters of the _De Vita Propria_ up to the last weeks of his life; and, scattered about these, there are records of his work of correction and revising. While telling of the books he has lately been engaged with, he wanders off in the same sentence to talk of the dream which urged him to write the _De Subtilitate_, and of the execution of the _Commentarii in Ptolomaeum_, during his voyage down the Loire. In 1573 he seems to have found the ma.s.s of undigested work more than he could bear to behold; for, after making extracts of such matter as he deemed worth keeping, he consigned to the flames no less than a hundred and twenty of his ma.n.u.scripts.[239] Before leaving Bologna he had put into shape the _Proxenata_, a lengthy collection of hints, maxims, and reflections as to everyday life; he had re-edited the _Liber Artis Magnae_, and had added thereto the treatise _De Proportionibus_, and the _Regula Aliza_. He also took in hand two books on Geometry, and one on Music, and this last he completed in 1574. On November 16, 1574, he records that he is at that moment writing an explanation of the more abstruse works of Hippocrates, but that he is yet far from the end of his task.

In the _De Libris Propriis_ he gives a list of all his 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 unfinished 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 refusing to qualify himself to become the commentator on Archbishop Peckham's _Perspectiva_.

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 s.h.i.+ps which I had made known four years before. This he did, understanding the subject only imperfectly, and making no mention of my name. But men of real learning also attacked me: Rondeletius, and Julius Scaliger; and Fuchsius, in the proem of his book, says that my work _Medicinae Contradictiones_ should be avoided like deadly poison. Julius Scaliger has been fully answered in the _Apologia_ in the Books on Subtlety."[240]

There is a pa.s.sage from De Thou's _History of his Own Times_, affixed to all editions of the _De Vita Propria_,[241] in which is given a contemporary sketch of Cardan during his residence at Rome. "His whole life," De Thou writes, "has been as strange as his present manners, and he, in sooth, out of singleness of mind or frankness, has written about himself certain statements, the like of which have never before been heard of a man of letters, and these I do not feel bound to unfold to any one, let him be ever so curious. I, myself, happening to be in Rome a few years before his death, often spoke to him and observed him with astonishment as he took his walks about the city clad in strange garb. When I considered the many writings of this famous man, I could perceive in him nothing to justify his great renown. Wherefore I am all the more inclined to turn to that very acute criticism of Julius Caesar Scaliger, who exercised his extraordinary genius in making a special examination of the treatise _De Subtilitate Rerum_. He, having carefully noted everywhere the unequal powers of this writer, decided that he was one who, in certain subjects, knew more than a man could know, while in others he seemed more simple than a child. In the science of Arithmetic he worked hard and made many discoveries; but he was subject to strange and excessive aberration of mind, and was guilty of the most impudent blasphemy, in that he was minded to subject to the artificial laws of the stars the Ruler of the stars Himself, for this thing he did in the horoscope of our Saviour which he drew."

Another witness of his life in Rome is Francois d'Amboise, a young French n.o.bleman, who was engaged on his book _De Symbolis Heroicis_. He says that he saw Cardan, who was living in a s.p.a.cious house, on the walls of which, in place of elegant paintings or vari-coloured tapestries, were written the words, "_Tempus mea possessio_."

In his later writings there are farther indications that he was wont to conjure up omens and portents chiefly at those times when he was in danger and mental distress. In the case which is given below, the omen showed itself in a season of trouble, but Cardan, in describing it later, treats it as if he were a modern scientist. The distressing memories of the imprisonment had faded, and writing in ease and security at Rome he begins to rationalize. In the dialogue between himself and his father, written shortly before his death, Fazio calls his son's attention to certain of the omens and portents already noticed; and, after discussing these, Jerome goes on to tell for the first time of another boding event which, as he affirms, distressed him even more than the loss of his office and the prohibition to publish his books. On the day of his incarceration, on two different occasions, he met a cow being driven to the slaughter-house, with much shouting and beating with sticks and barking of dogs. The explanation of this event which he puts in Fazio's mouth is entirely conceived in the spirit of rationalism. What was there to wonder at? There was a butcher's shop in the street, and animals going to slaughter would naturally be met there. Why should a man fear to meet a cow? If it had been a bull there might have been something in it. Then with regard to the shaking of a window-cas.e.m.e.nt; this might easily have been occasioned by the flight of a bird.[242] He was certainly less inclined to put faith in the warnings of the stars and in the lines of his hand. His line of life was very short and irregular, intersected and bifurcated, while the rest of the lines were little thicker than hairs. In his horoscope was a certain malefic influence which threatened that his life would be cut short before his forty-fifth year. "But," he writes in the year before his death, "here I am, living at the age of seventy-five."[243] The one supernatural idea which seems to have deepened with old age and remained undisturbed to the end was his belief in his attendant genius. In what he wrote during his last years his mood was almost entirely introspective, contemplative, and didactic, yet here and there he introduces a sentence which lets in a little light from his way of life and personal affairs, and helps to show how he occupied himself, and what his humour was. He tells how one day, in 1576, he was writing about the fennel plant in his treatise _De Tuenda Sanitate_, a plant which he praised highly because it pleased his palate. But shortly afterwards, when he was walking one day in the Roman vegetable market, an old man, shabbily dressed, met him and dissuaded him from the use of the plant aforesaid, saying: "In Galen's opinion you may as readily meet your death thereby as by eating hemlock."

"I answered that I knew well enough the difference between hemlock and fennel, but the old man said, 'Take care, I know what I am saying,' and went on murmuring something about Galen. Whereupon I went home and found in Galen a pa.s.sage I had not hitherto noticed, and, having changed my former views, I added many fresh excerpts to my treatise."

Although his faith may have been shaken in the ability of the stars to govern his own fortunes, he records a case in which he himself filled the post of _vates_, and which came to a sudden and terrible issue. Cardan was present at a supper-party, and in the course of conversation let fall the remark, "I should like to say something, were I not afraid that my words would disturb the company," to which one of the guests replied, "You mean that you would prophesy death to one of us here present." Cardan replied, "Yes, within the present year," and in the next sentence he tells how on the first day of December in that same year a certain young man, named Virgilius, who had been present at the gathering aforesaid, died, and he sets down this event as a fulfilment of his prophecy.

But in the same chapter he lets the reader into the secret of his system of prophecy, and displays it as simply an affair of common-sense, one recommended by Aristotle as the only trustworthy method of divining future events. Cardan writes: "I used to inquire what might be the exact nature of the business in hand, and began by making myself acquainted with the character of the locality, the ways of the people, and the quality of the chief actors. I unfolded a vast number of historical instances, leading events and secret transactions as well, and then, when I had confirmed the facts set forth by my method of art, I gave my judgment thereupon."[244]

In his latter years Cardan must have been in easy circ.u.mstances. The pension from the Pope--no mention is made of its amount--and the fees he received from his patients allowed him to keep a carriage; and writing in his seventy-fifth year, he says that no fees would tempt him to join any consultation unless he should be well a.s.sured what sort of men he was expected to meet.[245]

In the _Norma Vitae Consarcinata_[246] he relates how in April 1576 there were two inmates of the Xenodochium at Rome, Troilus and Dominicus. It seemed that Troilus exercised some strange and malefic influence over his companion, who was taken with fever. He got well of this, but only to fall into a dropsy, which despatched him in a week. Shortly before his death, at the seventh hour, he cried out to two Spaniards who were standing by the bed that he had suffered such great torture from the working of Troilus, and that he was dying therefrom. "Therefore," he cried, "in your presence I summon him with my dying words to appear before G.o.d's tribunal, that he may give an account of all the evil he has wrought against me." On the following day there came a messenger from Corneto, a few miles from Rome, saying that Troilus, who was sojourning there, had fallen sick. The physician inquired at what hour, and the messenger said it was at seven o'clock, a day or two ago. He lay ill some days, an unfavourable case, but not a desperate one, and one night shortly afterwards at seven o'clock, the top of the mosquito curtains fell, and he died at exactly the same hour as Dominicus.

He tells another long story of an adventure which befell him in May 1576.

One day he was driving in his carriage in the Forum, when he remembered that he wanted to see a certain jeweller who lived in a narrow alley close by. Wherefore he told his coachman, a stupid fellow, to go to the Campo Altoviti, and await him there. The coachman drove off apparently understanding the order; but, instead of going to the place designated, went somewhere else; so Cardan, when he set about to find his carriage, sought in vain. He had a notion that the man had gone to a spot near the citadel, so he walked thither, enc.u.mbered with the thick garments he had put on as necessary for riding in the carriage. Just then he met a friend of his, Vincenzio, a Bolognese musician, who remarked that Cardan was not in his carriage as usual. The old man went on towards the citadel, but saw nothing of the carriage; and now he began to be seriously troubled, for there was naught else to be done but to go back over the bridge, and he was wearied with long fasting and his heavy clothes. He might indeed have asked for the loan of a carriage from the Governor of the castle; but he was unwilling to do this, so having commended himself to G.o.d, he resolved to use all his patience and prudence in finding his way back. He set out, and when he had crossed the bridge, he entered the banking-house of the Altoviti to inquire as to the alteration in the rate of exchange on Naples, and there sat down to rest. While the banker was giving him this information, the Governor entered the place, whereupon Cardan went out and there he found his carriage, the driver having been informed by Vincenzio, whom he had met, of the mistake he had made. Cardan got into the carriage, and while he was wondering whether or not he had better go home and break his fast, he found three raisins in his pocket, and thus made a fortunate ending of all his difficulties.

All this reads like a commonplace chapter of accidents; but the events recorded did not present themselves to Cardan in this guise. He sits down to moralize over the succession of momentary events: his meeting with Vincenzio; Vincenzio's meeting with the driver, and directions given to the man to drive to the money-changers'; the presence of the Governor, his exit from the bank, his consequent meeting with the carriage, and his discovery of the raisins, seven occurrences in all, any one of which, if it had happened a little sooner or a little later, would have brought about great inconvenience, or even worse. He does not deny that other men may not now and then encounter like experiences, but the experiences of other men were not fraught with such momentous crises, nor did they foreshadow so many or grave dangers.

The chronicling of this episode and the fanciful coincidence of the deaths of Dominicus and Troilus may be taken as evidence that his idiosyncrasies were becoming aggravated by the decay of his faculties. Writing on October 1, 1576, he makes mention of the various testaments he had already made, and goes on to say that he had resolved to make a new and final disposition of his goods. He would fain have let his property descend to his immediate offspring, but with a son like Aldo this was impossible, so he left all to Gian Battista's son, who would now be a youth about eighteen years of age, Aldo getting nothing. He desired, for reasons best known to himself, that all his descendants should remain _in curatela_ as long as possible, and that all his property should be held on trust; if the issue of his body should fail, then the succession should pa.s.s in perpetuity to his kinsfolk on the father's side. He desired that his works should be corrected and printed, and that, if heirs failed entirely, his house at Bologna should pa.s.s to the University, and be styled, after his family, _Collegium Cardanorum_.

There is no authentic record of the exact date of Cardan's death. De Thou, in writing the record of 1576, says that if Cardan's life had been prolonged by three days he would have completed his seventy-fifth year. As Cardan's birthday was September 24, 1501, this would fix his death on September 21, 1576. The exact figures given by De Thou are: "eodem, quo praedixerat, anno et die, videlicet XI. Kalend. VIII.," and he adds by way of information that a belief was current at the time that Cardan, who had foretold how he would die on this day and in this year, had abstained from food for some days previous to his death in order to make the fatal day square with the prophecy.

But the details which Cardan himself has set down concerning the last few weeks of his life are inconsistent with the facts chronicled by De Thou.

In the _De Vita Propria_, chapter x.x.xvi., Cardan records how on October 1, 1576, he set to work to make his last will and testament, wherefore if credit is to be given to his version rather than to that of De Thou, he was alive and active some days after the date of his death as fixed by the chronicler. In cases where the record of an event of his early life given in the _De Vita Propria_ differs from an account of the same in some contemporary writing, the testimony of the _De Vita Propria_ may justly be put aside; but in this instance he was writing of something which could only have happened a few days past, and the balance of probability is that he was right and De Thou wrong. Bayle notices this discrepancy, and in the same paragraph taxes De Thou with a mistake of which he is innocent.

He states that De Thou placed the date of Cardan's death in 1575, whereas the excerpt cited above runs: "Thua.n.u.s ad annum MDLXXVI., p. 136, lib.

lxii. tom. 4. Romae magni nominis sive Mathematicus, sive Medicus Hieronymus Carda.n.u.s Mediol. natus hoc anno itidem obiit."

No mention is made of the disease to which Cardan finally succ.u.mbed. Had his frame not been of the strongest and most wiry, it must have gone to pieces long before through the havoc wrought by the severe and continuous series of ailments with which it was afflicted; so it seems permissible to a.s.sume that he died of natural decay. His body was interred in the church of Sant Andrea at Rome, and was subsequently transferred to Milan to be deposited finally under the stone which covered the bones of his father in the church of San Marco. This tomb, which Jerome had erected after Fazio's death, bore the following inscription:

FACIO CARDANO

1.C.

Mors fuit id quod vixi: vitam mors dedit ipsa, Mens aeterna manet, gloria tuta quies.

Obiit anno MDXXIV. IV. Kalend. Sept. anno aetatis Lx.x.x.

Hieronymus Carda.n.u.s Medicus Parenti posterisque V.P.[247]

FOOTNOTES:

[239] "Qua causa permotus sim ad scribendum, superius intellexisse te existimo, quippe somnio monitus, inde bis, terque, ac quater, ac pluries, ut alias testatus sum; sed et desiderio perpetuandi nominis. Bis autem magnam copiam ac numerum eorum perdidi; primum circa x.x.xVII annum, c.u.m circiter IX. libros exussi, quod vanos ac nullius utilitatis futuros esse intelligerem; anno autem MDLXXIII alios CXX libros, c.u.m jam calamitas illa cessa.s.set cremavi."--_De Vita Propria_, ch. xlv. pp. 174, 175.

[240] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 122.

[241] _De Vita Propria_, p. 232.

[242] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 639. In the _De Varietate_ he says that natural causes may in most cases be found for seeming marvels. "Ecce auditur strepitus in domo, potest esse mus, felis, ericius, aut quod tigna subsidant blatta."--p. 624.

[243] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xli. p. 152.

[244] _De Vita Propria_, chapter xlii., _pa.s.sim_.

[245] _Ibid.,_ p. 66.

[246] _Opera_, tom. i. p. 339.

[247] Tomasinus, _Gymnasium Patavinum_.

CHAPTER XIV

THE estimates. .h.i.therto made concerning Cardan's character appear to have been influenced too completely, one way or the other, by the judgment p.r.o.nounced upon him by Gabriel Naude, and prefixed to all editions of the _De Vita Propria_. Some writers have been disposed to treat Naude as a hide-bound pedant, insensible to the charm of genius, and the last man who ought to be trusted as the valuator of a nature so richly gifted, original, and erratic as was Cardan's. Such critics are content to regard as black anything which Naude calls white and _vice versa_. Others accept him as a witness entirely trustworthy, and adopt as a true description of Cardan the paragraphs made up of uncomplimentary adjectives--applied by Cardan to himself--which Naude has transferred from the _De Vita Propria_ and the _Geniturarum Exempla_ to his _Judicium de Cardano_.

It may be conceded at once that the impression received from a perusal of this criticism is in the main an unfavourable one of Cardan as a man, although Naude shows himself no n.i.g.g.ard of praise when he deals with Cardan's achievements in Medicine and Mathematics. But in appraising the qualifications of Naude to act as a judge in this case, it will be necessary to bear in mind the fact that he was in his day a leading exponent of liberal opinions, the author of a treatise exposing the mummeries and sham mysteries of the Rosicrucians, and of an "Apologie pour les Grands Hommes soupconnez de Magie," and a disbeliever in supernatural manifestations of every kind. With a mind thus attuned it is no matter of surprise that Naude should have been led to speak somewhat severely when called upon to give judgment on a man saturated as Cardan was with the belief in sorcery, witches, and attendant demons.

If Naude indeed set to work with the intention of drawing a figure of Cardan which should stand out a sinister apparition in the eyes of posterity, his task was an easy one. All he had to do was to place Jerome Cardan himself in the witness-box. Reference to the pa.s.sages already quoted will show that, in the whole _corpus_ of autobiographic literature, there does not exist a volume in which the work of self-dissection has been so ruthlessly and completely undertaken and executed as in Cardan's memoirs. It has all the vices of an old man's book; it is garrulous, vain-glorious, and full of needless repet.i.tion; but, whatever portion of his life may be under consideration, the author never shrinks from holding up to the world's gaze the result of his searches in the deepest abysses of his conscience. Autobiographers, as a rule, do not feel themselves subject to a responsibility so deep as this. Memory turns back to the contemplation of certain springs of action, certain achievements in the past, making a judicious selection from these, and excerpting only such as promise to furnish the possible reader with a pleasing impression of the personality of the subject. With material of this sort at hand, the autobiographer sets to work to construct a fair and gracious monument, being easily persuaded that it would be a barbarous act to mar its symmetry by the introduction of loathly and misshapen blocks like those which Cardan, had he been the artist, would have chosen first of all.

Naude, after he has recorded the fact that, from his first essay in letters, he had been a zealous and appreciative student of Cardan's works, sets down Cardan's picture of himself, taken from his own Horoscope in the _Geniturarum Exempla_, "nugacem, religionis contemptorem, injuriae illatae memorem, invidum, tristem, insidiatorem, proditorem, magum, incantatorem, frequentibus calamitatibus obnoxium, suorum osor[e=], turpi libidini deditum, solitarium, inamoenum, austerum, sponte etiam divinantem, zelotypum, lascivum, obscoenum, maledic.u.m, obsequiosum, senum conversatione se delectantem, varium, ancipitem, impur[u=], et dolis mulierum obnoxium, calumniatorem, et omnino incognitum propter naturae et morum repugnantiam, etiam his c.u.m quibus a.s.sidue versor." The critic at once goes on to state that in his opinion this description, drawn by the person who ought to know best, is, in the main, a correct one. What better account could you expect, he asks, of a man who put faith in dreams and portents and auguries; who believed fully in the utterances of crazy beldames, who saw ghosts, and who believed he was attended by a familiar demon? Then follows a catalogue of moral offences and defects of character, all taken from Cardan's own confessions, and a p.r.o.nunciation by Naude that the man who says he never lies, must be of all liars the greatest; the charge of mendacity being driven home by references to Cardan's alleged miraculous comprehension of the cla.s.sic tongues in a single night, and his pretended knowledge of a cure for phthisis. There is no need to follow Naude farther in his diatribe against the faults and imperfections, real and apparent, of Cardan's character; these must be visible enough to the most cursory student. Pa.s.sages like these arouse the suspicion that Naude knew books better than men, that at any rate he did not realize that men are to be found, and not seldom, who take pleasure in magnifying their foibles into gigantic follies, and their peccadilloes into atrocious crimes; while the rarity is to come across one who will set down these details with the circ.u.mstantiality used by Cardan.

There is one defect in the _De Vita Propria_--an artistic one--which Naude does not notice, namely, that in his narrative of his early days Cardan often over-reaches himself. His show of extreme accuracy destroys the perspective of the story, and, in his anxiety to be minute over the sequence of his childish ailments, the most trivial details of his uneasy dreams, and the cuffs he got from his father and his Aunt Margaret, he confuses the reader with mult.i.tudinous particulars and ceases to be dramatic. But the hallucinations which he nourished about himself were not all the outcome of senility. In the _De Varietate_, the work upon which he spent the greatest care, and the product moreover of his golden prime, he gives an account of four marvellous properties with which he was gifted.[248] The first of these was the power to pa.s.s, whenever the whim seized him, from sense into a kind of ecstasy. While he was in this state he could hear but faintly the sound of voices, and could not distinguish spoken words. Whether he would be sensitive to any great pain he could not say, but twitchings and the sharpest attacks of gout affected him not.

When he fell into this state he felt a certain separation about the heart, as if his soul were departing from that region and taking possession of his whole body, a door being opened for the pa.s.sage of the same. The sensation would begin in the cerebellum, and thence would be diffused along the spine. The one thing of which he was fully conscious, was that he had pa.s.sed out of himself. The second property was that, when he would, he could conjure up any images he liked before his eyes, real [Greek: eidola], and not at all to be compared with the blurred processions of phantoms which he was wont to see when he was a child. At the time when he wrote, perhaps by reason of his busy life, he no longer saw them whensoever he would, nor so perfectly expressed, nor for so long at a time. These images constantly gave place one to another, and he would behold groves, and animals, and orbs, and whatever he was fain to see.

This property he attributed to the force of his imaginative power, and his clearness of vision. The third property was that he never failed to be warned in dreams of things about to happen to him; and the fourth was that premonitory signs of coming events would display themselves in the form of spots on his nails. The signs of evil were black or livid, and appeared on the middle finger; white spots on the same nail portending good fortune.

Honours were indicated on the thumb, riches on the fore-finger, matters relating to his studies and of grave import on the third finger, and minor affairs on the little finger.

In putting together the record of his life, Cardan eschewed the narrative form and followed a method of his own. He collected the details of his qualities, habits, and adventures in separate chapters; his birth and lineage, his physical stature, his diet, his rule of life, his imperfections, his poverty, the misfortunes of his sons, his masters and pupils, his travels, his experiences of things beyond nature, his cures, the persecutions of his foes, and divers other categories being grouped together to make up the _De Vita Propria_, which, though it is the most interesting book he has left behind him, is certainly the most clumsy and chaotic from a literary point of view. The chapters for the most part begin with his early years, and end with some detail as to his life in Rome, each one being a categorical survey of a certain side of his life; but remarks as to his personal peculiarities are scattered about from beginning to end. He tells how he could always see the moon in broad daylight;[249] of his pa.s.sion for wandering about the city by night carrying arms forbidden by the law; of his practice of self-torture, beating his legs with a switch, twisting his fingers, pinching his flesh, and biting his left arm; and of going about within doors with naked legs; how at one time he was possessed with the desire, _heroica pa.s.sio_, of suicide; of his habit of filling his house with pets of all sorts--kids, lambs, hares, rabbits, and storks. The chapter in which he records all the maladies which afflicted him, puts upon the reader's credulity a burden almost as heavy as is the catalogue given by another philosopher of the number of authors he mastered before his twelfth year. Two attacks of the plague, agues, tertian and quotidian, malignant ulcers, hernia, haemorrhoids, varicose veins, palpitation of the heart, gout, indigestion, the itch, and foulness of skin. Relief in the second attack of plague came from a sweat so copious that it soaked the bed and ran in streams down to the floor; and, in a case of continuous fever, from voiding a hundred and twenty ounces of urine. As a boy he was a sleep-walker, and he never became warm below the knees till he had been in bed six hours, a circ.u.mstance which led his mother to predict that his time on earth would be brief.