66 FATHERS OF BIOLOGY. 



Mundinus, the professor of medicine at Bologna from 

 1315 to 1318, was the first to attempt any such thing. 

 He exhibited the public dissection of three bodies, but 

 by this created so great a scandal that he gave up the 

 practice, and contented himself with publishing a work, 

 " De Anatome," which formed a sort of commentary on 

 Galen. This work, with additions, continued to be the 

 text-book of the schools until the time of Vesalius, who 

 founded the study of anatomy as nowadays pursued. 



Andreas Vesalius was bom at Brussels, on the last day 

 of the year 1514, of a family which for several genera- 

 tions had been eminent for medical attainments. He 

 was sent as a boy to Louvain, where he spent the greater 

 part of his leisure in researches into the mechanism of 

 the lower animals. He was a born dissector, who, after 

 careful examination, in his early days, of rats, moles, dogs, 

 cats, monkeys, and the like, came, in after-life, to be dis- 

 satisfied with any less knowledge of the anatomy of man. 



He acquired great proficiency in the scholarship of the 

 day. Indeed the Latin, in which he afterwards wrote his 

 great work, is so singularly pure that one of his detractors 

 pretended that Vesalius must have got some good scholar 

 to write the Latin for him. Latin was not the only lan- 

 guage in which he was proficient ; he added Greek and 

 Arabic to his other accomplishments, and this for the 

 purpose of reading the great biological works in the lan- 

 guages in which they were originally written. From 



