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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 Ptolomæum, during his voyage down the Loire.
In the De Subtilitate he speaks of him as "Verbosus et studio contradicendi tædulus ut alterum vix ferre queas, in reliquo gravis jactura artium posita sit, quam nostræ ætatis viri restituere conati sunt." But as Galen's name is quoted as an authority on almost every page of the Consilia Medica, it may be assumed that Cardan's faith in his primary theories was unshaken.
This digression on the very threshold of the work is a sample of what the reader may expect to encounter all through the twenty-one books of the De Subtilitate and the seventeen of the De Varietate. Regardless of the claims of continuity, he jumps from principle to practice without the slightest warning.
Dissertations on the various sciences, the senses, the soul and intellect, things marvellous, demons and angels, occupy the rest of the chapters of the De Subtilitate. At the end of the last book of De Varietate, Cardan gives a table showing the books of the two works arranged in parallel columns so as to exhibit the relation they bear to each other.
Cardan writes of Brissac: "Erat enim Brissacus Prorex singularis in studiosis amoris et humanitatis." De Vita Propria, ch. iv. p. 14. "Mirumque in modum venenis cornu ejus adversari creditur." De Subtilitate, p. 315. De Vita Propria, ch. xxxiii. p. 105.
Writing of Britain in the De Subtilitate he had praised its delicate wool and its freedom from poisonous beasts: a land where the wolf had been exterminated, and where the sheep might roam unvexed by any beast more formidable than the fox.
After the heavy labour of editing and issuing to the world the De Rerum Varietate, and of re-editing the first issue of the De Subtilitate, Cardan might well have given himself a term of rest, but to a man of his temper, idleness, or even a relaxation of the strain, is usually irksome.
Erasmus he had attacked for venturing to throw doubts upon the suitability of Cicero's Latin as a vehicle of modern thought; this quarrel was over a question of form; and now Scaliger went a step farther, and, albeit he knew little of the subject in hand, published a book of Esoteric Exercitations to show that the De Subtilitate of Cardan was nothing but a tissue of nonsense.
Cardan notices the attack in these words "His diebus quidam conscripserat adversus nostrum de Subtilitate librum, Opus ingens. Adversus quem ego Apologiam scripsi." Opera, tom. i. p. 117. Scaliger absurdly calls his work the fifteenth book of Exercitations, and wished the world to believe that he had written, though not printed, the fourteen others.
In 1443 a copy of Celsus was found at Milan; Paulus Ægineta was discovered a little later. Opera, tom. ix. p. 1. De Varietate, p. 77. Opera, tom. i. p. 135. De Subtilitate, p. 445. "Galen's great complaint against the Peripatetics or Aristotelians, was that while they discoursed about Anatomy they could not dissect. He met an argument with a dissection or an experiment.
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