II THE ARREST OF ENQUIRY 83 



astronomy. As shown in the researches of Galen, 

 an Alexandrian physician of the second century, 

 there had been no difficulty in studying the structure 

 of the lower animals, but, fortified both by tradition 

 and by prejudice, the Church refused to permit dis- 

 section of the human body, and in the latter part of 

 the thirteenth century, Boniface VIII. issued a Bull 

 of the major excommunication against offenders. 

 Prohibition, as usual, led to evasion, and Vesalius, 

 Professor of Anatomy in Padua University, resorted 

 to various devices to procure * subjects/ the bodies of 

 criminals being easiest to obtain. The end justified 

 the means, as he was able to correct certain errors of 

 Galen, and to give the quietus to the old legend, based 

 upon the myth of the creation of Eve, that man 

 has one rib less than woman. This was among the 

 discoveries announced in his De Corporis Humani 

 Fabrica, published when he was only twenty-eight 

 years of age. The book fell under the ban of the 

 Church because Vesalius gave no support to the 

 belief in an indestructible bone, nucleus of the 

 resurrection body, in man. The belief had, no 

 doubt, near relation to that of the Jews in the os 

 sacrum, and may remind us of Descartes' fanciful loca- 

 tion of the soul in the minute cone-like part of the 

 brain known as the conarium> or pineal gland. On 

 some baseless charge of attempting the dissection of 

 a living subject, the Inquisition haled Vesalius to 

 prison, and would have put him to death 'as merci- 

 fully as possible/ but for the intervention of King 

 Charles V of Spain, to whom Vesalius had been 

 physician. -Returning in October 1564, from a 

 pilgrimage taken, presumably, as atonement for his 



