THE HISTORY OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY 583 



years, 1 700-1 750, will reflect the decline. And when we find 

 that the period 16 50- 1700 embraces 2,100 of the working 

 years 1 of the more prominent anatomists, whereas in the 

 succeeding fifty years the number shrinks to 1,700, the rise 

 and fall of the output becomes intelligible. It should be 

 noted that these figures leave out of account the lesser-known 

 writers, but their inclusion would only emphasise the above 

 result. 



There is no doubt that the seventeenth-century revival 

 was due to, or perhaps we should say was responsible for, 

 the foundation of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum in 1652, 

 the Royal Society of London in 1660, the French Academy of 

 Science in 1666, and the lesser-known but still important 

 "Collegium Anatomicum " of Amsterdam in c. 1665. In this 

 revival our own Royal Society may justly claim to have played 

 a considerable, if not the leading, part. Most of the prominent 

 anatomists, both at home and abroad, were Fellows of the 

 Society, and others, though not Fellows, were encouraged to 

 contribute to the Transactions. 2 Thus amongst the Fellows, 

 many of whom were publishing in the Transactions, we have 

 Mayow, Havers, Malpighi, Willis, Ruysch, Moulin, Needham, 

 Vallisnieri, Charleton, Glisson, Willughby, Lower, Douglas, 

 Lister, Kerckring, Leeuwenhoek, Bidloo, Tyson, Vieussens, 

 Grew, Ray, and Valentini, and the authors include C. Bartho- 

 linus, Highmore, Pecquet, Steno, Redi, Swammerdam, de 

 Graaf, and Nuck. A noteworthy exception to both categories 

 is Samuel Collins, jun., whose important and encyclopaedic 

 treatise on comparative anatomy, published in 1685, first 

 received justice in modern times at the hands of David Craigie, 

 Lecturer on Anatomy at Edinburgh, the author of an able, 

 scarce, and plagiarised history of anatomy. The Academia 

 Naturae Curiosorum, though the oldest of the societies in 

 question, was not the first to publish or to interest itself in 

 comparative anatomy, for its entry into the field bears the 

 date 1670. In the next thirty years, however, the Academy 

 published a large number of anatomical papers by some forty 



1 By this expression we mean years subsequent to the age of twenty-five. Only 

 rarely is important work published before that age is reached. 



1 For example, Malpighi was invited by the Secretary to correspond regularly 

 with the Society, and lines of research were even suggested to him. Leeuwenhoek's 

 first paper was published by the Society in 1673, and his last in 1724. 



