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Cardan at any rate found that he must once more beat a retreat from Milan, wherefore, at the end of April 1533, he made up his mind to remove to Gallarate. This town has already been mentioned as chief place of the district, from which the Cardan family took its origin.
Primmins's bones, they had been myths these twenty years, and you might as soon have found a Plesiosaurus in the fat lands of Romney Marsh as a bone amidst those layers of flesh in which my poor father thought he had so carefully cottoned up his Cardan. Leaving these parties to adjust matters between them, we stepped under the low doorway and entered Roland's room.
After he had waited for more than a month, Cassanate appeared alone, and brought with him a heavy purse of money for the cost of the long journey to Scotland, which he now begged Cardan to undertake, and a letter from the Archbishop himself, who wrote word that, though he had fully determined in the first instance to repair to Paris, or even to Lyons, to meet Cardan, he found himself at present mastered by the turn of circumstances, and compelled to stay at home.
This faculty is not confined to myself alone, it is the common property of all wise men, and it is known that the illustrious Cardan went without food during several years without being incommoded by it. On the contrary his mind became singularly vivacious. But still I'll eat what it pleases you to offer me, simply to please you." And he took a seat at our little table without any ceremony.
It is certain that he expended a vast amount of labour in attempting to reduce his collected mass of facts even to the imperfect form it wears in the De Varietate Rerum. Considering that this book covers to a great extent the same ground as its predecessor, Cardan must be credited with considerable ingenuity of treatment in presenting his supplementary work without an undue amount of repetition.
No mention is made of the disease to which Cardan finally succumbed. 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 assume that he died of natural decay.
Scaliger was a physician of repute; and it is not improbable that the spectacle of Cardan's triumphal progress back to Milan from the North may have aroused his jealousy and stimulated him to make his ill-judged attack. But even on the ground of medical science he was no match for Cardan, while in mathematics and philosophy he was immeasurably inferior.
Paracelsus, like Cardan, believed in an intense light infinitely superior to bestial reasoning and calls to mind certain philosophy of intuition of the present day. He too believed himself a magician and physician, and effected cures by the application of astrology to therapeutics.
He rates Scaliger for ignorance because he was evidently under the impression that Cardan was the first to draw a horoscope of Christ, and attacks Cardan chiefly on the score of plagiary. He records how divers writers in past times had done the same thing.
The Archbishop declared that his illness was alleviated but not cured, and only gave way unwillingly when Cardan brought forward arguments to show what dangers and inconveniences he would incur through a longer stay. Cardan had originally settled to return by way of Paris, but letters which he received from his young kinsman, Gasparo Cardano, and from Ranconet, led him to change his plans.
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