202 The Physiology of Digestion [lect. 



scope to his unwearied energy and wide knowledge by placing 

 him in more chairs than one. In 1709 he was made Ordinary 

 Professor of Medicine and of Botany; in 1715 he became also 

 Professor of Practical Medicine, and in 1716 Professor of 

 Chemistry as well. Much sought after as a physician, acute at 

 the bedside, brilliant as an expositor in the professorial chair, 

 he was also a great teacher in the sense that in his daily 

 intercourse with his pupils he was always ready to lay his 

 mind open before them, and to let them share in his experience 

 and in his thoughts. At Leyden he laboured all his life. He 

 was more than once Rector of the University ; and although, in 

 1729 he resigned the chairs of Botany and Chemistry and 

 allowed himself a leisure which he devoted chiefly to gardening 

 in a country seat which he had bought, he still continued to 

 teach medicine in spite of the diseases which were creeping 

 upon him in his old age ; and at Leyden he died in harness, 

 full of honour and esteem, on the 2:3rd September, 1738. 



Boerhaave was in almost all respects a different man from 

 Stahl. A learned scholar, and a sound scientific thinker, he 

 was too all round a man to be led away by any one idea 

 however tempting; essentially eclectic in nature, he gathered 

 truth from every source. Though living all his life in the Uni- 

 versity in which Sylvius had laboured so long and so strenuously, 

 though himself versed above his fellows in chemical knowledge, 

 his work on the subject being for years the great text-book of 

 the subject, he did not exalt chemistry above anatomy or above 

 physics. Though drawn to mathematics long before he thought 

 of medicine, though an ardent student of Borelli's works and 

 a pupil of the enthusiastic iatro-physicistPitcairn, who in 1692 

 had been brought from Edinburgh to occupy for a brief period 

 the chair of Medicine at Leyden, he did not think that all the 

 problems of the human body were such as could be solved by 

 the mere use of formulae and the calculus. Though the 

 intimate friend of the great anatomist Ruysch, he was not 

 readv to admit with him that anatomical disposition supplied 

 the answer to every physiological question. He made use of 

 anatomy, of physics and of chemistry, but he never allowed one 

 to exclude the other ; he was ready to apply each one of these 



