SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 171 



less improved by him. From his friend Swammerdam he had learnt the art 

 of using coloured wax for injections, and he acquired a masterly skill in this 

 method, such as few attained after him. He was able to fill out the finest 

 capillary vessels without either bursting or deforming them, and, besides, he 

 preserved the preparations thus carried out in a wonderfully natural manner. 

 And he was as jealous of his method as Leeuwenhoek was of his microscopes, 

 though really with far less excuse than the latter; the microscopes survived 

 the man who made them, while the method of injection went down with 

 its inventor to the grave. Even with regard to the value which his discoveries 

 had for science, the learned professor is no match for the untaught function- 

 ary, but Ruysch, in the application of his method, certainly did succeed in pro- 

 viding science with a mass of new facts, particularly in the sphere of human 

 anatomy. He discovered the bronchial arteries and the arachnoids of the 

 brain, besides which he studied and extended the knowledge of the iris and 

 retina of the eye; and, further, he compared the male and female skeleton and 

 investigated the changes made by age in the structure of bone. He made a 

 splendid collection of anatomical preparations, of which he published a 

 richly illustrated description. The objects were arranged in groups — human 

 organs, shells, minerals, and other things all together — in a manner which 

 in our time would be considered not only highly unscientific, but also utterly 

 lacking in taste.' His contemporaries, however, were ecstatic over it; for- 

 eigners visited the museum, and poets lauded it in verse. Tsar Peter of 

 Russia, who, as is well known, entertained almost childish admiration for all 

 products of technical skill, finally purchased the entire collection for thirty 

 thousand guilders, but naturally neither he nor any of his subjects could 

 make any use of it. A second collection, which was made later, was purchased 

 by the opponent of the Tsar, the Polish king Stanislaus Leszczynski. There is 

 now nothing left of these collections: it is only through Ruysch's books that 

 we in modern times can gain any idea of what he did. And it cannot be 

 denied that there was in him but little in the way of ideas, yet at the same 

 time extraordinary technical ability and quite a lot of humbug. 



There was another Dutch physician of the same age as he, Reinier de 

 Graaf, who possessed far sounder qualities as a scientist. Born in 1641 of 

 Catholic parents, he studied at Leyden and at Angers in France, where he 

 took his doctor's degree. When still quite young he had won a great reputa- 

 tion, but owing to his faith he was prevented from obtaining a professorship 

 at Leyden, which was a strictly Protestant university, and he therefore 

 settled down as a practitioner in Delft. His unusually promising career was 

 cut short in 1673, when a serious illness deprived him of a happy domestic 

 life and the possibility of carrying on his intensive research-work. He had 



' Thus there was amongst the groups the skeleton of a child holding a piece of injected 

 peritoneum like a handkerchief before its eyes. 



