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, and that he should have dared to hint that those which he (Cardan) had sent for solution were not his own, but the property of Giovanni Colla. Cardan had found Colla to be a conceited fool, and had dragged the conceit out of him--a process which he was now about to repeat for the benefit of Messer Niccolo Tartaglia. The letter goes on to contradict all Tartaglia's assertions by arguments which do not seem entirely convincing, and the case is not made better by the abusive passages interpolated here and there, and by the demonstration of certain errors in Tartaglia's book on Artillery. In short a more injudicious letter could not have been written by any man hoping to get a favour done to him by the person addressed. In the special matter of the problems which he sent to Tartaglia by the bookseller Juan Antonio, Cardan made a beginning of that tricky and crooked course which he followed too persistently all through this particular business. In his letter he maintains with a show of indignation that he had long known these questions, had known them in fact before Colla knew how to count ten, implying by these words that he knew how to solve them, while in reality all he knew about them was the fact that they existed. Tartaglia in his answer is not to be moved from his belief, and tells Cardan flatly that he is still convinced Giovanni Colla took the questions to Milan, where he found no one able to solve them, not even Messer Hieronimo Cardano, and that the mathematician last-named sent them on by the bookseller for solution, as has been already related.