BEGINNINGS OF MODERN NATURAL SCIENCE 227 



tenced to perform a penitential journey to Jerusalem. At all 

 events, he went to Jerusalem and was shipwrecked and lost while 

 returning. 



After Vesalius the study of human anatomy was vigorously and 

 successfully prosecuted in Italy as was natural, since it was in Italy 

 that Humanism and the revival of learning first took firm hold 

 of Christian Europe. One of Vesalius' Italian contemporaries, 

 Eustachius, whose name is still familiarly associated with the pas- 

 sage or "tube" connecting the throat and the middle ear, is hardly 

 less famous in the history of anatomy than is Vesalius himself. 

 The name of Fallopius, professor at Pisa in 1548 and at Padua 

 in 1551, is also similarly associated with the human oviducts, 

 the so-called Fallopian tubes. His disciple Fabricius of 

 Acquapendente discovered the valves in the veins, and was the 

 teacher of William Harvey. A Spanish anatomist of note, Michael 

 Servetus, born 1509, perished as a martyr at the stake in 

 1553 because of heretical writings abhorrent alike to the In- 

 quisition and to Calvin. 



Of physiology we have as yet little or no account. Doubtless 

 all the anatomists just mentioned and many other "philosophers" 

 had pondered, as did Aristotle and his predecessors, on the workings 

 of the animal, and especially the human, mechanism. But from 

 Aristotle (B.C. 322) to William Harvey (1578-1657) no real progress 

 was made. It is a melancholy commentary on superstition and 

 human prejudice that long after the brilliant work of Vesalius and 

 the Italian anatomists, no proper "anatomy acts" existed to make 

 lawful dissection either possible or easy, so that for several cen- 

 turies afterward anatomists, surgeons, and medical students felt 

 themselves at times obliged to resort to "body-snatching." 



NATURAL HISTORY AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. No great 

 progress was made in this field after the observations of Aristotle, 

 Theophrastus, Xenophanes, and Pythagoras until the sixteenth 

 century. Fossils mostly remained unexplained or were regarded as 

 " freaks " of nature. Animals and plants were comparatively neg- 

 lected and, if studied, considered either as the raw material for sup- 

 posed remedies or medicines, or else as treated by Aristotle. The 



