I90 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. FT. m. 



struggle on through the increasing mass of knowledge and 

 gather up a fragment here and there, a general idea of the 

 progress of science may be gained such as will enable young 

 readers to turn to more advanced scientific books with much 

 greater interest, even though they may learn very little of 

 any one science. 



*" Astronomy, Physics, and to a certain extent Chemistry, 

 had made such a start at the end of the seventeenth century 

 that it was a great many years before those men who came 

 after Newton, Halley, Huyghens, and Stahl, had mastered 

 the new discoveries sufficiently to progress any farther. 

 Therefore we find that it was not in these sciences that most 

 advance was made in the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 

 tury, but in those which relate to living beings, and which 

 are all included under the head of Biology, or the science of 

 life. Medicine, Anatomy, and Physiology were the branches 

 which grew most rapidly about this time ; and the five great 

 men whose names stand out most conspicuously are Boer- 

 haave, Haller, John Hunter, Bonnet, and Spallanzani: Boer- 

 haave as the founder of the study of organic chemistry, 

 Haller and Hunter as the fathers of comparative anatomy, 

 and Bonnet and Spallanzani as the discoverers of some very 

 remarkable facts in physiology. We will take these subjects 

 in regular order, and try to understand something of the 

 work which was done in them. 



Medical School of Leyden. Foundation of Organic 

 Chemistry by Boerhaave, 1701. On the coast of Holland, 

 just where the Rhine empties itself by a number of small 

 channels into the German ocean, stands the city of Leyden, 

 which became famous in the year 1574, on account of a 

 siege of four months which the starving inhabitants endured 

 with the utmost heroism, when the Protestant Netherlanders 

 were struggling for life and liberty against Philip II. of Spain. 



