in] of the New Physics. 57 



who were studying, like himself, anatomy and medicine, he- 

 must have heard much of the man who had come to Padua 

 from Pisa some six years before, and who making use and at 

 the same time further developing a new method of thought 

 and a new means of inquiry, which under the name of mathe- 

 matics had been making great progress in the latter half of the 

 preceding century, was bringing forth astounding new things, 

 not only about the sun and the stars, but also abou*> the 

 working of machines and the fundamental properties of mutter. 

 For Galileo Galilei had in 1592 left his native city Pisa, where 

 he had already made some of his immortal discoveries, to 

 become Professor at Padua, where till 1610 he fruitfully 

 laboured, as yet unharassed, for the blood-hounds of the Church 

 had not caught scent of the heresies of his teachings. 



It is not for me here to dwell on Galileo's labours in 

 physical science; but it is important, in the history of physio- 

 logy, to remember that through his and his fellow labourers' 

 inquiries, the science of physics made at this epoch a great 

 bound forward. The influence of that progress made itself 

 almost immediately felt in the science of living things. 



Before I go on however to speak of the definite new 

 contributions to physiology which may be regarded as the 

 more or less direct outcome of the new school of exact and 

 mathematical physical science, I must as it were turn aside to 

 speak of one who without making so much as one single 

 physiological discovery wrote a treatise on and expounded a 

 complete system of physiology. This however he wrote not for 

 the purpose of advancing physiology in particular, but as a 

 contribution to a general system of philosophy ; and though by 

 it physiology gained no immediate new results, indeed much of 

 the teaching contained in it was retrograde, yet the general 

 ideas which inspired it influenced physiological thinkers even 

 of his own time, and still more those of the times which 

 followed. 



Rene Descartes, born near Tours in 1596, and dying at 

 Stockholm in 1650, makes a great figure in the history of 

 human thought. He was a great mathematician ; he may be 

 said to have invented analytical geometry. He was an accom- 



