eral chapters to an account of his duties.

[42] "Ab anno 1509 usque ad annum 1515 ob bellum Cameracense Gymn.
interrmissum fuit."--_Elenchus nominum Patavii_ (1706), p. 28. The first
names given after this interregnum are Dom. Jo. Maria de Zaffaris, Rector
in Arts, and Dom. Marinus de Ongaris, Rector in Jurisprudence in 1527.

Papadapoli (_Historia Gymn. Patav._) gives the name of Ascanius Serra as
pro-Rector in 1526: no Rector being mentioned at all.

[43] _De Vita Propria_, ch. xxx. p. 79.

[44] _De Vita Propria_, ch. iv. p. 13.

CHAPTER III

DURING his life at Padua it would appear that Cardan, over and above the
allowance made to him by his mother, had no other source of income than
the gaming-table.[45] However futile and disastrous his sojourn at this
University may have been, he at least took away with him one possession of
value, to wit his doctorate of medicine, on the strength of which he began
to practise as a country physician at Sacco. The record of his life during
these years gives the impression that he must have been one of the most
wretched of living mortals. The country was vexed by every sort of
misfortune, by prolonged warfare, by raging pestilence, by famine, and by
intolerable taxation;[46] but while he paints this picture of misery and
desolation in one place, he goes on to declare in another that the time
which he spent at Sacco was the happiest he ever knew.[47] No greater
instance of inconsistency is to be found in his pages. He writes: "I
gambled, I occupied myself with music, I walked abroad, I feasted, giving
scant attention the while to my studies. I feared no hurt, I paid my
respects to the Venetian gentlemen living in the town, and frequented
their houses. I, too, was in the very flower of my age, and no time could
have been more delightful than this which lasted for five years and a
half."[48]

But for almost the whole of this period Cardan was labouring under a
physical misfortune concerning which he writes in another place in terms
of almost savage bitterness. During ten years of his life, from his
twenty-first to his thirty-first year, he suffered from the loss of virile
power, a calamity which he laments in the following words: "And I maintain
that this misfortune was to me the worst of evils. Compared with it
neither the harsh servitude under my father, nor unkindness, nor the
troubles of litigation, nor the wrongs done me by my fellow-townsmen, nor
the scorn of my f