108 Malpighi and the Physiology [lect. 



titular honour of Bishop of Titiopolis in Greece, he was sent as 

 Yicar Apostolic to the northern countries of Europe in the 

 hope that he might win back to the true faith many of the 

 erring ones in the land in which he had been born and bred. 



Led apparently by the thought that he might turn the old 

 weapons which he had wielded so well to the use of his new 

 purposes, he began once more to teach anatomy in his native 

 city of Copenhagen, the strange position of a Catholic Bishop 

 professing a mundane subject in a heretic university being 

 accepted by the authorities, and approved by the Church. But 

 the position was false as well as strange ; the changed voice no 

 longer as of old spoke with authority and power; the zeal for 

 knowledge which had in old days charmed men as they 

 listened to him, no longer made itself felt ; and zeal for good, 

 however fervent, could not take its place. Stensen soon saw 

 that it was false ; he gave up wholly all such attempts to work 

 his old life into his new calling. Resigning his chair he hence- 

 forward devoted himself to the more usual duties of a priest. 

 For nine years he lived in Germany, first at Hanover and then 

 at Schwerin, a life of severe self-denial, labouring constantly 

 for the welfare of the poor, with no thought but that of 

 winning souls for the Church. The privations which he laid 

 upon himself, and the toils which he underwent for others, 

 were too much for the body, which had once filled so much of 

 his thoughts, and which he now held as a thing of nought. 

 He wore himself to death ; and in 1686 at the relatively early 

 age of forty-eight passed away. The brilliant achievements of 

 his early days and the sanctity of his later life made his name 

 in different ways precious at Florence ; and at the command of 

 the Duke of Tuscany the emaciated corpse of one who had 

 been at once an apostle of science and a martyr to the calls of 

 religion was brought back to Florence and buried with public 

 honours in the city fitted perhaps above all others to receive it, 

 as being, like the dead one, at once famous for learning and 

 zealous for the Church. 



Stensen gives a graphic description of his discovery of the 

 parotid duct. He relates how, while he was residing with and 

 studying under Blasius, one morning, when he was engaged in 



