f at her death:--"Itaque cum a luctu dolor et
vigilia invadere soleant, ut mihi anno vertente in morte uxoris Luciae
Bandarenae quanquam institutis philosophiae munitus essem, repugnante tamen
natura, memorque vinculi c[o=]jugalis, suspiriis ac lachrymis et inedia
quinque dierum, a periculo me vindicavi."

CHAPTER V

AT this point it may not be inopportune to make a break in the record of
Cardan's life and work, and to treat in retrospect of that portion of his
time which he spent in the composition of his treatises on Arithmetic and
Algebra. Ever since 1535 he had been working intermittently at one or
other of these, but it would have been impossible to deal coherently and
effectively with the growth and completion of these two books--really the
most important of all he left behind him--while chronicling the goings and
comings of a life so adventurous as that of the author.

The prime object of Cardan's ambition was eminence as a physician. But,
during the long years of waiting, while the action of the Milanese doctors
kept him outside the bounds of their College, and even after this had been
opened to him without inducing ailing mortals to call for his services, he
would now and again fall into a transport of rage against his persecutors,
and of contempt for the public which refused to recognize him as a master
of his art, and cast aside his medical books for months at a time,
devoting himself diligently to Mathematics, the field of learning which,
next to Medicine, attracted him most powerfully. His father Fazio was a
geometrician of repute and a student of applied mathematics, and, though
his first desire was to make his son a jurisconsult, he gave Jerome in
early youth a fairly good grounding in arithmetic and geometry, deeming
probably that such training would not prove a bad discipline for an
intellect destined to attack those formidable tomes within which lurked
the mysteries of the Canon and Civil Law. Mathematical learning has given
to Cardan his surest title to immortality, and at the outset of his career
he found in mathematics rather than in medicine the first support in the
arduous battle he had to wage with fortune. His appointment to the Plat
lectureship at Milan has already been noted. In the discharge of his new
duties he was bound, according to the terms of the endowment of the Plat
lecturer, to teach the sciences of geometry, arithmetic, and astronomy,
and he began his course upon the lines