74 FATHERS OF BIOLOGY. 



destitute of medullary substance. Again, when Vesalius 

 showed that Galen was wrong in describing the human 

 femur and humerus as greatly curved, Sylvius explained 

 the discrepancy by saying that the wearing of narrow 

 garments by the moderns had straightened the limbs. 



Through these attacks, however, the writings of Vesalius 

 fell into somewhat bad odour in the court ; for in that 

 very superstitious age there was a kind of vague dread 

 felt of reading the works of a man against whom such 

 serious charges of arrogance and impiety were brought. 

 And so it came about that when he received the 

 summons to take up his residence permanently at 

 Madrid, and the orthodoxy of the day seemed for the 

 moment to triumph, in a fit of proud indignation, he 

 burned all his manuscripts ; destroying a huge volume 

 of annotations upon Galen; a whole book of medical 

 formulae; many original notes on drugs; the copy of 

 Galen from which he lectured, and which was covered 

 with marginal notes of new observations that had 

 occurred to him while demonstrating; and the paraphrases 

 of the books of Rhases, in which the knowledge of the 

 Arabian was collated with that of the Greeks and others. 

 The produce of the labour of many years was thus 

 .reduced to ashes in a short fit of passion, and from this 

 time Vesalius lived no more for controversy or study. 

 He gave himself up to pleasure and the pursuit of wealth, 

 resting on his reputation and degenerating into a mere 



