THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 17 



own, in some ways, more accurate studies studies in 

 which, as my colleague Professor Brooks of the Johns 

 Hopkins University has pointed out, he has forestalled 

 Wolf and von Baer. 



The work of Fabricius which really concerns us here 

 is the de Venarum Ostiolis. Others before him had 

 seen and described the valves of the veins, Carolus one 

 of the great Stephani, Sylvius and Paul Sarpi. But an 

 abler hand in this work has dealt with the subject, and 

 has left us a monograph which for completeness and for 

 accuracy and beauty of illustration has scarcely its equal 

 in anatomical literature. Compare Plate VII, for ex- 

 ample, with the illustrations of the same structures in 

 the Bidloo or the Cowper Anatomy, published nearly 

 one hundred years later; and we can appreciate the 

 advantages which Harvey must have enjoyed in working 

 with such a master. Indeed, it is not too far-fetched to 

 imagine him, scalpel in hand, making some of the very 

 dissections from which these wonderful drawings were 

 taken. But here comes in the mystery. How Fabricius, 

 a man who did such work how a teacher of such wide 

 learning and such remarkable powers of observation, 

 could have been so blinded as to overlook the truth 

 which was tumbling out, so to speak, at his feet, is to 

 us incomprehensible. But his eyes were sealed, and to 

 him, as to his greater predecessors in the chair, clear 

 vision was denied. The dead hand of the great Per- 

 gamite lay heavy on all thought, and Descartes had not 

 yet changed the beginning of philosophy from wonder 

 to doubt. Not without a feeling of pity do we read of 

 the hopeless struggle of these great men to escape from 

 slavish submission to authority. But it is not for us in 

 these light days to gauge the depth of the sacred venera- 

 tion with which they regarded the Fathers. Their 

 B 



