THE HISTORY OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY 581 



Ruini, Aldrovandus, Casserius, Fabricius, Ingrassia, 1 Riolan, 

 Butler, C. Bartholinus, Crooke, Paauw, Spigelius, Aselli, 

 Harvey, Worm, Descartes, T. Bartholinus, Vesling, Tulp, 

 Wirsung and Severini. 2 We doubt whether any subsequent 

 period could be made to furnish a list of such formidable 

 names. And yet in spite of it no flourishing school of com- 

 parative anatomy was founded, and the research of the period 

 was clearly the result of independent and sporadic activity. 

 Great works were plentiful, but a slow and cautious generation 

 hesitated to endorse them. Vesalius waited nine years before 

 he brought out a second edition of his celebrated Fabrica, 

 although the work passed through ten editions in thirty years. 

 It then ceased to be printed, but was revived and enjoyed a 

 considerable vogue in the first half of the seventeenth century. 

 The second edition of Harvey's De Motu Cordis only appeared 

 eleven years after the first, but nine editions were issued 

 within about the first thirty years. The beautiful anatomical 

 works of Casserius enjoyed a more brisk but fleeting popularity, 

 but Coiter, important as we now know him to be, was hardly 

 reprinted at all. Fabricius' papers on comparative anatomy, 

 produced within the first twenty years of the seventeenth 

 century, passed through a few editions, but Severini 's striking 

 Zootomia was never reprinted, and is now one of the rarest 

 of the older books on comparative anatomy. Ruini 's magni- 

 ficent treatise on the anatomy of the Horse enjoyed a better 

 fortune, and was re-issued six times in the first twenty years, 

 but even here the second part of the work on the diseases and 

 care of the horse doubtless accounts for its popularity. What 

 continuity there is at this period is provided by the school 

 of anatomy at Padua, where with such successive professors 

 as Vesalius, Columbus, Fallopius, Fabricius, Casserius, Spi- 

 gelius, and Veslingius an anatomical tradition could hardly 

 fail to arise and expand. What in fact is most striking in 

 the period before 1650 is the failure to follow up, confirm, or 

 even accurately copy a new departure in anatomy. When 

 Coiter demonstrated, as he did completely, the interest and 

 importance of comparative anatomy, why did the next essay 

 in this promising field take twenty-six years to mature? 



1 Posthumous. 



3 This list is in chronological order as regards the first important work of each 

 author. 



