BIOLOGY AND HUMAN PROBLEMS 



found, ofttimes at considerable cost. Peter of Abano, one 

 of the first great lights of Padua, was persecuted for ex- 

 pressing the belief that diseases had natural rather than 

 supernatural causes, and avoided the fagots of the church 

 only by dying opportunely. 



Obviously the organic sciences had no structure at the 

 beginning of the sixteenth century. There existed only the 

 Greek foundation, frayed and weather-beaten. The New 

 World, therefore, is no newer than biology. It is no more 

 than justice to say that biology, in the true sense, began 

 when Vesalius the Fleming, just turned twenty-three, was 

 given the chair of surgery and anatomy at the University 

 of Padua in 1537. Vesalius cast aside authority and, trusting 

 solely to his own observations, labored to such purpose 

 that in five years he was able to publish the monumental 

 folio "D^ Humani Corporis Fabrica," illustrated with the 

 beautiful drawings of that gifted student of Titian, John 

 de Calcar. His work received the vigorous opposition 

 usually accorded to innovators. He had found no incor- 

 ruptible resurrection bone which theologians had held 

 must exist; he had discovered that man has the same 

 number of ribs on each side of the body, to the great horror 

 of the students of Genesis; and he had caught the ancient 

 master, Galen, in numerous errors. But the efforts of the 

 opposition had little effect. Vesalius, together with his 

 lesser contemporaries, Eustachius and Fallopius, had 

 established anatomy as an observational science; and 

 shortly after, with the aid of the newly discovered micro- 

 scope, it was carried to great heights by Malpighi in Italy, 

 by Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam, and Lyonet in Holland, 

 by Reaumur in France, and by Hooke and Grew in England. 

 Probably no greater morphological work has ever been 

 completed than the entomological dissections made by the 

 brilliant Italian and his distinguished co-workers from the 

 Low Countries. 



[17] 



