THE ORGANS OF VOLUNTARY MOTION. 443 



held that the eye was not made for seeing, nor the ear for hearing ; 

 and Asclepiades, whom we have already mentioned as an impudent 

 pretender, adopted this wild dogma. 15 Such assertions required no 

 labor. " It is easy," says Galen, 16 " for people like Asclepiades, when 

 they come to any difficulty, to say that Nature has worked to no pur- 

 pose." The great anatomist himself pursues his subject in a very 

 different temper. In a well-known passage, he breaks out into an 

 enthusiastic scorn of the folly of the atheistical notions." " Try," he 

 says, " if you can imagine a shoe made with half the skill which appears 

 in the skin of the foot." Some one had spoken of a structure of the 

 human body which he would have preferred to that which it now has. 

 " See," Galen exclaims, after pointing out the absurdity of the imagi- 

 nary scheme, " see what brutishness there is in this Avish. But if I 

 were to spend more words on such cattle, reasonable men might blame 

 me for desecrating my work, which I regard as a religious hymn in 

 honor of the Creator." 



Galen was from the first highly esteemed as an anatomist. He was 

 originally of Pergamus ; and after receiving the instructions of many 

 medical and philosophical professors, and especially of those of Alex- 

 andria, which was then the metropolis of the learned and scientific 

 world, he came to Rome, where his reputation was soon so great as to 

 excite the envy and hatred of the Roman physicians. The emperors 

 Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus would have retained him near 

 them ; but he preferred pursuing his travels, directed principally by 

 curiosity. When he died, he left behind him numerous works, all of 

 them of great value for the light they throw on the history of anatomy 

 and medicine ; and these were for a long period the storehouse of all 

 the most important anatomical knowledge which the world possessed. 

 In the time of intellectual barrenness and servility, among the Ara- 

 bians and the Europeans of the dark ages, the writings of Galen had 

 almost unquestioned authority ; ie and it was only by an uncommon 

 effort of independent thinking that Abdollatif ventured to assert, that 

 oven Galen's assertions must give way to the evidence of the senses. 

 In more modern times, when Yesalius, in the sixteenth century, 

 accused Galen of mistakes, he drew upon himself the hostility of the 

 whole body of physicians. Yet the mistakes were such as might hare 



16 Sprengel, ii. 15. De Usu Part. v. 5, (on the kidneys.) 



' T De U*u Part. in. 10. 18 Sprengel, ii. 359. 



