steps towards the prosecution of
his design. If he knew anything of Tartaglia's character, and it is
reasonable to suppose that he did, he would naturally hesitate to make any
personal appeal to him, and trust to chance to give him an opportunity of
gaining possession of the knowledge aforesaid, rather than seek it at the
fountain-head. Tartaglia was of very humble birth, and according to report
almost entirely self-educated. Through a physical injury which he met with
in childhood his speech was affected; and, according to the common Italian
usage, a nickname[93] which pointed to this infirmity was given to him.
The blow on the head, dealt to him by some French soldier at the sack of
Brescia in 1512, may have made him a stutterer, but it assuredly did not
muddle his wits; nevertheless, as the result of this knock, or for some
other cause, he grew up into a churlish, uncouth, and ill-mannered man,
and, if the report given of him by Papadopoli[94] at the end of his
history be worthy of credit, one not to be entirely trusted as an
autobiographer in the account he himself gives of his early days in the
preface to one of his works. Papadopoli's notice of him states that he was
in no sense the self-taught scholar he represented himself to be, but that
he was indebted for some portion at least of his training to the
beneficence of a gentleman named Balbisono,[95] who took him to Padua to
study. From the passage quoted below he seems to have failed to win the
goodwill of the Brescians, and to have found Venice a city more to his
taste. It is probable that the contest with Fiore took place after his
final withdrawal from his birthplace to Venice.

In 1537 Tartaglia published a treatise on Artillery, but he gave no sign
of making public to the world his discoveries in Algebra. Cardan waited
on, but the morose Brescian would not speak, and at last he determined to
make a request through a certain Messer Juan Antonio, a bookseller, that,
in the interests of learning, he might be made a sharer of Tartaglia's
secret. Tartaglia has given a version of this part of the transaction;
and, according to what is there set down, Cardan's request, even when
recorded in Tartaglia's own words, does not appear an unreasonable one,
for up to this time Tartaglia had never announced that he had any
intention of publishing his discoveries as part of a separate work on
Mathematics. There was indeed a good reason why he should refrain from
doing this