io6 EMBRYOLOGY FROM GALEN [pt. ii 



Nature is intent on forming all the members, but how from being 

 an animal it becomes a child, thou seest not yet, moreover this is 

 so difficult a point that formerly it led astray one more wise than thou 

 [Averroes], so that in his teaching he separated the active 'intellect' 

 from the soul because he could not see any organ definitely appro- 

 priated by it. Open thy heart to the truth and know that as soon 

 as the brain of the foetus is perfectly organised, the Prime Mover, 

 rejoicing in this display of skill on the part of Nature, turns him 

 towards it and infuses a new spirit replete with power into it which 

 subsumes into its own essence the active elements which it finds al- 

 ready there, and so forms one single soul which lives and feels and 

 is conscious of its own existence. And that thou mayst find my saying 

 less strange, bethink thee how the heat of the sun passing into the 

 juice which the grape distils, makes wine". 



Having said this. Statins, Virgil and Dante pass on to the seventh 

 ledge in Purgatory. It is interesting to see how Dante emphasises 

 the dynamic teleological side of Aristotle and practically speaks of 

 the soul enfleshing itself and arranging organs for its faculties. The 

 reference to Averroes is explained by the fact that Averroes was a 

 Traducianist, and held that all the soul was generated by man at 

 the same time as the body, whereas both St Thomas and Dante, as 

 Creationists, held that each fresh soul was a special creation of God 

 inserted by him into the brain of the embryo. The mention of Dante's 

 contemporary, Mondino de Luzzi (1270-1326), brings us to the more 

 practical aspects of embryology at this period. Mondino is the most 

 outstanding figure among the Bolognese anatomists of what is really 

 the first period of the revival of biology. After him, as we shall see, 

 biology languished for a couple of centuries until the advent of such 

 men as Ulysses Aldrovandus in the sixteenth century, and Singer has 

 shown that this was probably due to the fact that anatomy professors 

 did not dissect in person. A fortiori embryotomy was infrequent. 



But Mondino's Anathomia, published in 13 16, contained statements 

 about the organs of generation which were rather important. He 

 retains the notion of the seven-celled uterus, which had been intro- 

 duced by Michael Scot, but he adopts a reasonable compromise 

 between the opinions of Galen and Aristotle on the physiology of 

 embryo formation. The distance between him and Leonardo da 

 Vinci (1452-1519) would, however, be estimated rather at five or six 

 centuries than at the century and a quarter that it actually was. 



