30 BIOLOGY AND ITS MAKERS 



quoting it: "He at once began to teach anatomy in his own 

 new way. Not to unskilled, ignorant barbers would he en- 

 trust the task of laying bare before the students the secrets of 

 the human frame; his own hand, and his own hand alone, 

 was cunning enough to track out the pattern of the structures 

 which day by day w^ere becoming more clear to him. Fol- 

 lowing venerated customs, he began his academic labors by 

 'reading' Galen, as others had done before him, using his 

 dissections to illustrate what Galen had said. But, time after 

 time, the body on the table said something different from 

 that which Galen had written. 



"He tried to do w^hat others had done before him — he 

 tried to believe Galen rather than his own eyes, but his eyes 

 were too strong for him; and in the end he cast Galen and 

 his writings to the winds, and taught only what he himself 

 had seen and what he could make his students see, too. 

 Thus he brought into anatomy the new spirit of the time, 

 and the men of the time, the young men of the time, answered 

 the new voice. Students flocked to his lectures; his hearers 

 amounted, it is said, to some five hundred, and an enlightened 

 senate recognized his worth by repeatedly raising his emol- 

 uments. 



"Five years he thus spent in untiring labors at Padua. 

 Five years he wrought, not weaving a w^eb of fancied thought, 

 but patiently disentangling the pattern of the texture of 

 the human body, trusting to the words of no master, ad- 

 mitting nothing but that which he himself had seen; and at 

 the end of the five years, in 1542, while he was as yet not 

 twenty-eight years of age, he was able to write the dedi- 

 cation to Charles V of a folio work entitled the ' Structure of 

 the Human Body,' adorned with many plates and woodcuts 

 which appeared at Basel in the following year, 1543." 



His Physiognomy. — This classic with the Latin title, 

 De Humani Corporis Fabrica, requires some special notice; 



