Scaliger

SCALIGER, the Latinized name of the great Della Scala family. (See VERONA.) It has also been borne by two scholars of extraordinary eminence.

I. Julius Caesar Scaliger

(1484-1558) was, according to his own account, a scion of the house of La Scala, born in 1484 at the castle of La Rocca on the Lago de Garda. At the age of twelve his kinsman the emperor Maximilian placed him among his pages. He remained for seventeen years in the service of the emperor, distinguishing himself as a soldier and as a captain. But he was unmindful neither of letters, nor of art, which he studied under Albrecht Duren In 1512 at the battle of Ravenna, where his father and elder brother were killed, he displayed prodigies of valour, and received the highest honours of chivalry, but no sub stantial reward, from his imperial cousin. After a brief employ ment by the duke of Ferrara, he entered (1514) as a student at the university of Bologna, where he remained until 1519. The next six years he passed in Piedmont, as a guest of the family of La Rovere, until a severe attack of rheumatic gout brought his military career to a close. Henceforth his life was wholly devoted to study. In 1525 he accompanied M. A. de la Rovere, bishop of Agen, to that city as his physician. Such is the outline of his own account of his early life. It was not until after his death that his son's enemies first alleged that he was the son of Benedetto Bor done, an illuminator or school-master of Verona ; that he was educated at Padua, where he took the degree of M.D. ; and that his story of his life and adventures bef ore arriving at Agen was a tissue of fables. (See below ad fin.) The remaining thirty-two years of his life were passed almost wholly at Agen, in the full light of contemporary history. At his death in 1558 he had the highest scientific and literary reputation of any man in Europe. A few days after his arrival at Agen he fell in love with Andiette de Rogues Lobejac, and at forty-five he married Andiette, who was then sixteen. The marriage, of which there were fifteen children, was one of almost uninterrupted happiness. In 1531 he printed his first oration against Eras mus, in defence of Cicero and the Ciceronians. It is a piece of

vigorous invective, displaying an astonishing command of Latin, and much brilliant rhetoric, but full of vulgar abuse, and com pletely missing the point of the Ciceronianus of Erasmus. The second is even more abusive, and less successful. The orations were followed by a prodigious quantity of Latin verse, which appeared in successive volumes in 1533, 1546 and 1547; of these, a friendly critic, Mark Pattison, is obliged to approve the judgment of Huet, who says, "par ses poesies brutes et informes Scaliger a deshonore le Parnasse." A brief tract on comic metres (De comicis dimensionibus) and a work De causis linguae Latinae—the earliest Latin grammar on scientific prin ciples and following a scientific method—were his only other purely literary works published in his lifetime. His Poetice ap peared in 1561 after his death.

His scientific writings are all in the form of commentaries, and it was not until his seventieth year that (with the exception of a brief tract on the De insornniis of Hippocrates) he published any of them. In 1556 he printed his Dialogue on the De plantis at tributed to Aristotle, and in 1557 his Exercitationes on the work of Jerome Cardan, De subtilitate. His other scientific works, Com mentaries on Theophrastus' De causis plantarum and Aristotle's History of Animals, left in a more or less unfinished state, were not printed until after his death. His Exercitationes upon the De subtilitate of Cardan (1557) is the book by which Scaliger is best known as a philosopher. We are astonished at the encyclo paedic wealth of knowledge which the Exercitationes display, at the vigour of the author's style, at the accuracy of his observa tions, but are obliged to agree with G. Naude that he has com mitted more faults than he has discovered in Cardan, and with Charles Nisard that his object seems to be to deny all that Cardan affirms and to affirm all that Cardan denies. Yet Leibniz and Sir William Hamilton recognized him as the best modern exponent of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle. He died at Agen on Oct. 21, 1558.