ON BIOLOGY. 7 



years after Mondino had made his brilliant demonstra- 

 tions, direct from the human subject, Dubois, Fernei and 

 Etienne, of the French school, were still almost blindly 

 following the ancient writings of Galen, and using only 

 the bodies of the lower animals for material. But what 

 is still more strange, those Frenchmen were, apparently, 

 entirely ignorant of all the excellent work that had been 

 accomplished by their Italian predecessors in the science. 



But this torpor was not destined to remain long upon a 

 nation which subsequently gave birth to such powerful 

 lights, both in natural science and anatomy. The young 

 Fleming, Andrew Vesalius, was the first to enter the 

 French arena, and throwing off the Galenian yoke, about 

 the middle of the Sixteenth Century, he presented the 

 learned world with a truly marvelous work upon anatomy, 

 his dissections being all original and made both upon 

 men, women, children and the lower animals. His en- 

 gravings were exquisite, and he at once rose high in the 

 estimation of his cotemporaries. The labors of Versalius 

 greatly enhanced the claims of anatomy to a science, and 

 those claims gained a still firmer foothold through the 

 researches along the same lines made by others in the 

 school of Bologna and elsewhere, in Italy, who soon fol- 

 lowed him. I refer to the brilliant works of Bartholomeo 

 Eustachi, of Columbus, of Fallopius, of Ingrassi^s, of 

 Aranzi, of Variolus, and of Fabricius. Spain gave us 

 Servetus, and England, the immortal Harvey, about this 

 time. 



What I have told you thus far about the growth of the 

 natural sciences and of anatomy will serve as an example 

 to show how other sciences grew out of the labors of the 

 ancients, and came to be what they were in the 

 Sixteenth Century. The career of physiology was more 

 or less linked to that of anatomy, while botany and some 

 of the other departments developed much in the same 

 manner as did the last named science. 



The dawn of better days had now appeared in Europe; 

 human knowledge was again awakening into life; the 

 taste for learning was once more being appreciated, and in 

 defiance of persecution, the faggot and the Inquisition, 

 scientific culture had taken on a career which, in all 

 probability, is destined not to be checked again in the 

 history of humanity in time to come. 



Just here it is important to observe the interesting fact, 

 that the scientific writers, down to the time of the decline 

 of the Roman Empire, rarely or never confined their obser- 

 vations to any single department, but, on the contrary, 



