Note 835 — Chapter IX

Playfair, in his second dissertation in the Encyclopædia Britannica, though he cannot but condemn Cardan, seems to think Tartaglia rightly treated for having concealed his discovery; and others have echoed this strain. Tartaglia himself says in a passage I have read in Cossali, that he meant to have divulged it ultimately; but in that age money as well as credit was to be got by keeping the secret; and those who censure him wholly forget, that the solution of cubic equations was, in the actual state of algebra, perfectly devoid of any utility to the world.