( 42 ) vwiwtt. 



Observations on the History and Progress of Comparative 

 Anatomy. By David CnAiGiE, M. D., &c. (Continued 

 from former volume, page 307.) 



Section III. — Early Zootomical AutJiors to Eustachius. 1501-1576. 



idiERONYMo Cakdan, wliose name has been introduced into 

 anatomical history by Douglas, and retained by Haller and 

 Portal, is with little justice entitled to that distinction. He was 

 certainly a man of genius, as well as learning ; and the number 

 of sciences which he cultivated, with sufficient success to com- 

 mand the admiration of his contemporaries, indicates the activity 

 and comprehensiveness of his intellectual powers, as well as the 

 ambitious and aspiring character of his mind. Besides gram- 

 mar, rhetoric, music, history, and ethics, Cardan was ambitious 

 to excel in physics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, astrology, 

 anatomy, medicine, and natural history. There are very few, 

 however, whose mental powers admit of this universality ; and 

 the expectation of excellence in all, is dearly purchased by the 

 sacrifice of useful and accurate acquaintance with several branches 

 of science. The genius of Cardan was more under the influence 

 of fancy than judgment. Almost void of accurate observation, 

 and utterly destitute of patient research, his habits of study 

 were desultory and irregular ; and he appears, in most of his 

 pursuits, to have been more solicitous of the glory and distinc- 

 tion ascribed to superior knowledge, than of that pure satisfac- 

 tion which results from the discovery of truth, and the acquisi- 

 tion of useful information. His writings, which are bad copies 

 of the ancients, abound in puerile and fabulous stories, with 

 much of the astrological and geomantic physiology then fashion- 

 able. His incidental sketches of the anatomy of animals con- 

 tain nothing new, original, or important ; and I should have 

 omitted him entirely, had I not found that he had observed a 

 fact in animal physiology which has exercised the observation of 

 Hunter and others, — that birds, and especially pheasants, are 

 liable to change sex. 



The example which Rondelet set in the finny tribes, was fol- 

 lowed as to the birds by his contemporary, Pierre Belon of 

 Mans, a learned traveller, and an assiduous student of botany 



