122 Van Helmont and the Rise [lect. 



If you take up a text-book of modern physiology you will 

 find page after page occupied with chemical matters. In 

 some text-books digestion and its consequences take up so large 

 a space as to suggest to the reader that the stomach is the 

 larger part of man, It is not so with the writings of Vesalius. 

 In that chapter in the Fabrica of which I have spoken as his 

 compendium of experimental physiology, the whole of digestion 

 and nutrition is dismissed in almost a single sentence. " Though- 

 " there is no difficulty in examining living dogs at different times 

 "after they have been fed with the view of investigating the 

 " functions of the alimentary canal, yet we learn little more by 

 " vivisection than we do by the study of the dead body, as 

 "regards the function of the liver, spleen, kidney, or bladder. 

 "It may perhaps please one to excise the spleen, as I have 

 " done, the animal living many days afterwards." 



There is, so far as I know, not a single reference in any 

 of Vesalius' writings to that study of the intimate nature of 

 things which under the name of chemistry, or rather of alchemy, 

 was beginning to stir men's minds and which was pushing its 

 way into the art of medicine. The great anatomist would no 

 doubt have made use of his bitterest sarcasms had someone 

 assured him that the fantastic school which was busy with 

 occult secrets and had hopes of turning dross into gold, would 

 one day join hands in the investigation of the problems of life 

 with the exact and clear anatomy so dear to him. 



Nor did Harvey any more than Vesalius pay heed to 

 chemical learning. His book on the heart contains no more 

 references to this than do the writings of Vesalius, and even 

 his work on generation expounds only the chemistry of the 

 ancients. 



During the sixteenth century however and still more in the 

 seventeenth century there grew up side by side, but as yet apart 

 from the physiology on which we have so far dwelt, a know- 

 ledge having an origin quite separate from anatomy, and 

 indeed at first quite separate from the study of living things, 

 a knowledge of which subsequently every physiologist had to 

 make use. y^With this knowledge the men of the seventeenth 

 century of whom we have spoken, Borelli, Malpighi and others 



