who pass judgment on Cardan, taken solely as a Physician or
as a Mathematician, will give a presentment more fallacious than imperfect
generalizations usually furnish, for in Cardan's case the man, taken as a
whole, was incomparably greater than the sum of his parts. Naude remarks
that a man who knows a little of everything, and that little imperfectly,
deserves small respect as a citizen of the republic of letters, but Cardan
did not belong to this category, as Julius Caesar Scaliger found to his
cost. He was not like the bookmen of the revival of learning--Poliziano,
Valla, or Alberti may stand as examples--who after putting on the armour
of the learned language and saturating themselves with the _literae
humaniores_, made excursions into some domain of science for the sake of
recreation. Cardan might rather be compared with Varro or Theophrastus in
classic, and with Erasmus, Pico, Grotius, or Casaubon in modern times. On
this point Naude indulges in something approaching panegyric. He
writes--"Investigation will show us that many excelled him in the
humanities or in Theology, some even in Mathematics, some in Medicine and
in the knowledge of Philosophy, some in Oriental tongues and in either
side of Jurisprudence, but where shall we find any one who had mastered so
many sciences by himself, who had plumbed so deeply the abysses of
learning and had written such ample commentaries on the subjects he
studied? Assuredly in Philosophy, in Metaphysics, in History, in Politics,
in Morals, as well as in the more abstruse fields of learning, nothing
that was worth consideration escaped his notice."

The foregoing eulogy from the pen of an adverse critic gives eloquent
testimony to Cardan's industry and the catholicity of his knowledge. As to
his industry, the record of his literary production, chronicled
incidentally in the course of the preceding pages, will be evidence
enough, seeing that, from the time when he "commenced author," scarcely a
year went by when he did not print a volume of some sort or other; to say
nothing of the production of those multitudinous unpublished MSS., of
which some went to build up the pile he burnt in his latter years in Rome,
while others, perhaps, are still mouldering in the presses of university
or city libraries of Italy. Frequent reference has been made to the more
noteworthy of his works. Books like the _De Vita Propria_, the _De Libris
Propriis_, the _De Utilitate ex Adversis Capienda_, th