by Cardan, and asked for answers to them; but Tartaglia,
having glanced at them, declared that they were not framed by Cardan at
all, but by Giovanni Colla. Colla, he declared, had sent him one of these
questions for solution some two years ago. Another, he (Tartaglia) had
given to Colla, together with a solution thereof. Juan Antonio replied by
way of contradiction--somewhat lamely--that the questions had been handed
over to him by Cardan and no one else, wishing to maintain, apparently,
that no one else could possibly have been concerned in them, whereupon
Tartaglia replied that, supposing the questions had been given by Cardan
to Juan Antonio his messenger, Cardan must have got the questions from
Colla, and have sent them on to him (Tartaglia) for solution because he
could not arrive at the meaning of them himself. He waved aside Juan
Antonio's perfectly irrelevant and fatuous protests--that Cardan would not
in any case have sent these questions if they had been framed by another
person, or if he had been unable to solve them. Tartaglia, on the other
hand, declared that Cardan certainly did not comprehend them. If he did
not know the rule by which Fiore's questions had been answered (that of
the _cosa_ and the _cubus_ equal to the _numerus_), how could he solve
these questions which he now sent, seeing that certain of them involved
operations much more complicated than that of the rule above written? If
he understood the questions which he now sent for solution, he could not
want to be taught this rule. Then Juan Antonio moderated his demand still
farther, and said he would be satisfied with a copy of the questions which
Fiore had put to Tartaglia, adding that the favour would be much greater
if Tartaglia's own questions were also given. He probably felt that it
would be mere waste of breath to beg again for Tartaglia's answers. The
end of the matter was that Tartaglia handed over to the messenger the
questions which Fiore had propounded in the Venetian contest, and
authorized Juan Antonio to get a copy of his own from the notary who had
drawn up the terms of the disputation with Fiore. The date of this
communication is January 2, 1539, and on February 12 Cardan writes a long
letter to Tartaglia, complaining in somewhat testy spirit of the reception
given to his request. He is aggrieved that Tartaglia should have sent him
nothing but the questions put to him by Fiore, thirty in number indeed,
but only one in substance,