The Gold-Headed Cane. 283 



etiam indulgentift Praefecti, in prsesentid Warderi, qui cum 

 in scribendo me non multum adjuvit, facit, quod tibi gratum 

 fore reor, ne longior sim." (J. F. ad R. M. De quibusdam 

 Variolorum Generibus.) 



England is richer than any other country in anatomical 

 preparations, — and our anatomists have always maintained a 

 Iiigh reputation for their skill in this department. In 1823, 

 the late Earl of Winchilsea presented to the College of Phy- 

 sicians some curious specimens which belonged to his ances- 

 tor Dr. Harvey. — 



** The preparations themselves consist of six tables, or boards, 

 upon which are spread the different nerves and blood-vessels, 

 carefully dissected out of the body: in one of them, the semilunar 

 valves of the aorta are distinctly to be seen. When Harvey deli- 

 vered his Lumleian Lectures, he may frequently have exhibited 

 these preparations, and, by their help, explained some points of 

 his new doctrine of the circulation of the blood. They were most 

 probably made by Harvey himself; and he might have learned the 

 art in Italy, for he studied at Padua in 1602. A few years after- 

 wards, on his return to England, he was appointed anatomical 

 and surgical lecturer to the College of Physicians, and, in 1616, 

 read a course of lectures there, of which the original manuscripts 

 are preserved in the British Museum. In the College of Surgeons 

 are some preparations, similar to those of Harvey, which originally 

 belonged to the Museum of the Royal Society, kept at Gresham 

 College. They were the generous gift of John Evelyn, Esquire, 

 who bouglit them at Padua, where he saw them, with great industry 

 and exactness, (according to the best method then used,) taken out 

 of the body of a man, and very curiously spread upon four large 

 tables. They were the work of Fabricius Bartoletus, then Veslin- 

 gius's assistant there, and afterwards physician to the King of 

 Poland The history of the art would be a sub- 

 ject of curious investigation. In the Philosophical Transactions 

 for May, 1666, Mr. Boyle mentions a method he had invented of 

 preserving or embalminp^ the embryo of a chick, in a glass filled 

 with spirit of wine, to which he sometimes added a little sal am- 

 moniac, as he observed it never coagulated the spirit of wine. 

 Ruysch, the professor at Amsterdam, if not the discoverer of the 

 use of injections, for the display of vascular and other structures, 

 contributed, together with the suggestions of De Graaf and Swam- 

 nierdam, by his own ingenuity and industry, to introduce that 

 important practice among anatomists. His museum became ulti- 

 mately the most magnificent that any private individual had ever, 



at that time, accumulated It was purchased in 



1717, by the Czar Peter the Great, for thirty thousand florins, 

 and sent to Petersburg. Dr. Frank NichoUs, who married a 

 daughter of Mead's, was the inventor of corroded anatomical pre- 



U2 



