5 8o SCIENCE PROGRESS 



of becoming known were greater than London publication 

 could secure. This is an obvious case, for no one would think 

 of giving any country other than England the credit of this 

 work, but it is manifest that, with the lesser known men, a 

 mistake could easily arise. As regards work extending over 

 more than one year, and published in more than one volume, 

 the date of each volume has been graphed. 



For the period between the years 1543 and i860 we have 

 made records of 6,436 publications which deal wholly or partly 

 with the anatomy of animals, omitting those which treat 

 exclusively of human anatomy and systematic zoology. It is 

 inevitable that we have missed many, but the number can 

 hardly bear any serious proportion to those we have recorded, 

 nor do we think that the omissions would affect the general 

 conclusions to be drawn from the study of the charts. In 

 fig. 1, in which all our records have been plotted, and which 

 thus embraces the history of comparative anatomy in Europe 

 generally for the period in question, each division horizontally 

 represents a year, and each vertical division one publication. 

 Thus in the year 1800, thirty- two papers dealing with the 

 anatomy of animals were published. The other charts read in 

 the same way. 



An examination of fig. 1 shows that only intermittent 

 research was carried on before the year 1650, which is the more 

 surprising as this period was very prolific in men of note. 

 For example, in the few years between 1504 and 1523 we 

 record the birth of Estienne, Rondelet, Servetus, Caius, Mizaldus, 

 Ingrassia, Vesalius, Salviani, Columbus, Gesner, Belon, Pare, 

 Csesalpinus, Eustachius, Aldrovandus and Fallopius. From 

 the latter year, beginning with Coiter, the birth-rate sharply 

 declines, and does not recover until the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century. It follows from this rise and fall that 

 we have an outcrop of publications between 1540 and 1575, 

 then a comparative blank for over fifteen years, after which 

 the next generation begins to be active in the last decade of 

 the century. For the whole period 1543-1650 we have pub- 

 lished works, many of them of striking originality and import- 

 ance, by Vesalius, Caius, Estienne, Pare, Belon, Gesner, Wotton, 

 Servetus, 1 Salviani, Rondelet, Sylvius, 2 Columbus, Fallopius, 

 Eustachius, Caesalpinus, Coiter, Varolius, Bauhin, Dulaurens, 

 1 Printed but not published. ■ Posthumous. 



