512 EVOLUTION, HEREDITY, EUGENICS 



he was hunted from one country to another, imprisoned in the 

 dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome for six years, and finally was 

 burned alive because he would not recant. 



Among the first in the new liberty of the Renaissance was the 

 great William Haj-vey (i 578-1657). He was graduated from Cam- 

 bridge and finished his medical education at Padua under the anat- 

 omist Fabricius. Vesalius, by his studies on the human body and 

 his observation on the valves of the heart, and Fabricius (1537- 

 1619), by his studies on the veins of the heart, had paved the way 

 for Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. Harvey 

 lectured first on the circulation of the blood in 161 5, completed his 

 work in 1616, and after years of demonstration before the Royal 

 College of Physicians finally published his little book on The 

 Movements of the Heart and of the Blood, in 1628. He established 

 the fact that the arteries are responsible for the pulse, and that 

 muscular contraction of the heart causes the circulation of the blood. 

 He greatly stimulated morphological and physiological work, and 

 revived the experimental method lost since the Greeks. 



John Ray (Wray) (i 628-1 705), a contemporary of Harvey, did 

 excellent systematic work. He is called the " Father of Modern 

 Zoology." Ray applied the term species to individuals derived from 

 similar parents. He noted variations but did not conclude that 

 they were of constant character. 



Just prior to Lamarck, Ray and Linnaeus defined a species^ thus 

 calling attention to the characteristics of animals and plants. The 

 idea of the. fixity oi species became the opinion of many biologists as 

 well as theologians. A few less sheeplike clung to the idea that 

 species were changeable; and were naturally ripe for the reception 

 of the evolutionary hypothesis. 



Biiffon (1707-1788), while not a contributor to technical scien- 

 tific literature, was of a philosophical turn and definitely popularized 

 natural history. In his Histoire Naturelle he set forth the idea of 

 the gradual production of different types of forms. He noted the ills 

 of slavery, the presence of rudimentary organs in animals and the fact 

 that in man a poor quality of food determined degenerative changes. 



Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swede, was the founder of modern, 

 systematic biologv. He established one principle that is more to his 

 credit than anything else. He invented Binomial Nomenclature.^ 



' In 1623, Kaspar Bauhin published a treatise, The Pinax, in which he overthrew the 

 alphabetical arrangement of plants and started the system of using two names to indi- 

 cate the plant under consideration. 



