G LECTURES 



Gesner, who was born at Zurich, in 1516, was engaged 

 upon his principal work, the "Historia Naturalis Ani- 

 malium." In the four folio volumes of that treatise we 

 but again see a series of illy selected extracts from the 

 works of Aristotle, Pliny, and ^Elian, the latter who 

 wrote, in Greek, a "History of Animals," toward the 

 close of the Second Century. Hardly any original mat- 

 ter was added, and his engravings were rude and unreli- 

 able, being regarded now more in the light of objects of 

 curiosity rather than any value being attached to them 

 as positive contributions to science. 



One other name is deserving of mention, as repre- 

 senting this period, and I refer to that laborious 

 naturalist, Ulysses Aldrovani, one of the professors 

 of Bologna, who was born in that city, in 1527, and died 

 early in the next century. He was of noble birth, a 

 zealous collector, and published some works upon birds 

 and one upon insects. Other folio volumes appeared after 

 his death. He was a builder upon the lines laid down by 

 Gesner, from whom he borrowed extensively, although 

 he furthered the science to some extent by his own obser- 

 vations, thus adding his mite to the then slowly increas- 

 ing stock of human knowledge of the natural sciences. 



So much, then, for the progress that men had made in 

 those subjects at the close of the sixteenth cemury. Anat- 

 omy, in so far as it took into consideration the structure 

 of man and the vertebrates below him, had been far 

 more fortunate during the same epoch. In the Italian 

 school, strongest at Bologna, it grew as it did in other 

 countries where the science was cultivated out of the 

 teachings of Galen. Nevertheless, Mondino, a teacher in 

 Bologna, and having every claim to being the father of 

 modern anatomy, as early as 1315 dissected specimens of 

 the human subject and demonstrated the position of 

 many structures upon the bodies of two females. His 

 descriptions, however, were much corrupted by ideas 

 derived from the Arabian writers. 



A most zealous promoter of anatomical science fol- 

 lowed in Italy at the birth of the Sixteenth Century. 

 This was James Berenger, who declared that he had dis- 

 sected during his career over one hundred human bodies. 

 He most assuredly made good use of them, for his contri- 

 butions to a better knowledge of the anatomy of man 

 were of the most substantial character, and many of his 

 descriptions are distinguished for their great accuracy 

 and minuteness. As compared with Italy, France made 

 at first but tardy progress in anatomy, and a hundred 



