64 NATUKE AND LIFE. 



graving magnificent plates of almost as great service to the 

 advance of anatomical studies as the most successfully com- 

 pleted original researches. This acquired knowledge, al- 

 ready extensive, was improved in the seventeenth and eigh- 

 teenth centuries by a succession of able men, whose names of 

 themselves recall laborious lives and brilliant achievements. 

 Harvey, in 1619, demonstrates the circulation of the blood; 

 after him Wirsung points out the pancreatic duct ; Pecquet, 

 the thoracic duct ; Rudbeck and Thomas Bartholin, the 

 lymphatic conduits ; Vieussens throws light upon the whole 

 of neurology. Still later Ruysch, Albinus, Haller, Boer- 

 haave, Winslow, Vicq-d'Azyr, unite the gains of their per- 

 sistent investigations with those won by their predecessors. 

 To sum up all, the descriptive anatomy of the human 

 body was in a state of remarkable completeness at the 

 close of the eighteenth century. The outward arrange- 

 ment, the shape and relations of the bones, muscles, nerves, 

 vessels, and viscera, were settled in a positive manner, suffi- 

 cient for the needs of the surgical art. Great was the 

 amazement of old anatomists at that day when a man of 

 genius arose, to tell them, and convince them, too, that 

 merely the first half of anatomy was known, and that the 

 coarser and more superficial part ; and that another half, 

 full of difficulties and surprises, invited investigation. This 

 is exactly the fact as to general anatomy and Xavier Bichat, 

 who is its founder. In truth, those organs known in their 

 contour, their disposition, and locality, were but half known. 

 Their texture, their inner composition, their delicate tissue, 

 were all unknown. The essential properties of the mem- 

 branes that make them up had not been analyzed. That is 

 the aim of the new anatomy created by Bichat. A bold 

 and fertile experimenter, as well as an able and clear- 

 sighted observer, equally skilled in knowledge of the sound 

 and of the unsound man, deep and lucid as a thinker, un- 

 tiring and wonderfully fortunate in the methodical investi- 



