Volume 1

Jerome Cardan : the life of Girolamo Cardano, of Milan, physician / by Henry Morley.

  • Morley, Henry, 1822-1894.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Jerome Cardan : the life of Girolamo Cardano, of Milan, physician / by Henry Morley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    own Life, which is no autobiography, but rather a garrulous disquisition upon himself, written by an old man when his mind was affected by much recent sorrow. In that work Cardan reckoned that he had published one hundred and thirty-one books, and that he was leaving behind him in manuscript one hundred and eleven. It is only by a steady search among his extant works, and by collecting into a body statements and personal allusions which occur in some of them, assigning to each its due place, and, as far as judgment can be exercised, its due importance, that a complete narrative can be obtained, or a right estimate formed of his Life and Character. Of such collation this work]is the result; and, although it is inevitable that there should be errors and omissions in it, since the ground is new, the labour on it has been great, and I am but a feeble workman,—yet, forasmuch as the book is an honest one, in which nothing vital has been held back or wrongly told, except through ignorance, and no pains have been grudged to make the drawback, on ac- count of ignorance, as small as possible, I am not afraid to put my trust in the good-nature of the reader who shall detect some of its omissions and shortcomings. The following sentences, from the notice of Cardan in Tiraboschi’s History of Italian Literature, fairly represent