Fardklla, Michael Angelo

, a celebrated professor of astronomy and natural history at Padua, was born in 1650, of a noble family, at Tripani in Sicily. He entered the third order of St. Francis; taught mathematics at Messina, and theology at Rome, where he had taken a doctor’s’ |

degree in the college della Sapienza. Francis II. duke of Modena made him professor of philosophy and geometry in his capital; but he gave up that situation to go to Venice, where he quitted the Franciscan habit in 1693, by permission of the pope, and took that of a secular priest. He was afterwards appointed professor of astronomy and physic in the university of Padua, and died at Naples, from a second attack of an apoplexy, January 2, 1718. Fardella had a lively genius and fertile imagination, but became 50 absent, by a habit of profound thought, that he sometimes appeared to have lost his senses. He left sereral works on literature, philosophy, and mathematics; some in Latin, others in Italian. The principal are, “Universae Philosophise Systema,” Venice, 16iU, 12mo; “Universae Usualis Mathematics Theoria,” 12mo; “Animoe humanae Natura ab Augustino detecta,” 1698, folio; several works in favour of Descartes’s philosophy, &c. ¹