NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. i 57 



garding the existence of such a bone to the theologians. He could 

 not lie, he' did not wish to fight the Inquisition, and thus he fell 

 under suspicion. 



The strength of this theological point may be judged from the 

 fact that no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the 

 executioner to find out whether, when he burned a criminal, all 

 the parts were consumed ; and only then was the answer received 

 which fatally undermined this superstition. Still, in 1689 we find 

 it still lingering in France, creating an energetic opposition in 

 the Church to dissection. Even as late as the eighteenth century, 

 Bernouilli having shown that the living human body constantly 

 undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are renewed 

 in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn upon 

 him, especially from the theologians, who saw in this statement 

 danger to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that for 

 the sake of peace he struck out his argument on this subject from 

 his collected works.* 



Still other encroachments upon the theological view were 

 made by the new school of anatomists, and especially by Vesa- 

 lius. During the middle ages there had been developed various 

 theological doctrines regarding the human body ; these were 

 based upon arguments showing what the body ought to be, and 

 naturally, when anatomical science showed what it is, these doc- 

 trines fell. An example of such popular theological reasoning is 

 seen in a wide-spread belief of the twelfth century, that during 

 the year in which the cross of Christ was taken by Saladin, chil- 

 dren, instead of having thirty or thirty-two teeth as before, had 

 twenty or twenty-two. So, too, in Vesalius's time another doc- 

 trine of this sort was dominant : it had long been held that Eve, 

 having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out of 

 Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every man 

 than on the other. It was also held upon the authority of Genesis 

 that the Almighty created man literally out of the dust of the 

 earth, and breathed life into his nostrils. This twofold creation 

 was a favorite subject with illuminators of missals, and especially 

 with those who illustrated Bibles and religious books in the first 



* For the resurrection bone, see Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Graces en France, 

 Paris, 1866, p. 162. For Vesalius, see especially Portal, Hist, de l'Anatomie et de la Chi- 

 rurgie, Paris, lYYO, tome i, p. 40V. Also Henry Morley, in his Clement Marot, and other 

 essays. For Bernouilli and his trouble with the theologians, see Wolf, Biographien zur 

 Culturgeschichte der Schweiz, vol. ii, p. 95. How different Mundinus's practice of dissec- 

 tion was from that of Vesalius may be seen by Cuvier's careful statement that the entire 

 number of dissections by the former was three ; the usual statement is that there were but 

 two. See Cuvier, Hist, des Sci. Nat., tome iii, p. 1 ; also Sprengel, Fredault, Hallam, and 

 Littre ; also Whewell, Hist, of the Inductive Sciences, vol. iii, p. 328 ; also, for a very full 

 statement regarding the agency of Mundinus in the progress of anatomy, see Portal, vol. i, 

 pp. 209-216. 



