CH, xxiv. HALLER ANATOMIST. 195 



CHAPTER XXIV. 



SCIENCE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (CONTINUED). 



Haller Foundation of Gottingen University Rise of Comparative 

 Anatomy John Hunter His Museum Bonnet Spallanzani. 



Haller, 17O8-1777. Among the pupils of Boerhaave there 

 was one man who became, in some respects, even more 

 famous than his master. This was Albert von Haller, son of 

 the Chancellor of Baden, who was ^Born at Berne in 1708, 

 and died in 1777. Haller seems to have been a most extra- 

 ordinary child ; at nine years of age it is said that he knew 

 Latin and Greek, and had written a Hebrew and Greek 

 dictionary, a Chaldean grammar, and an historical dictionary! 

 We are not told how good these books were ; but how very 

 few boys of nine years old would have been able to write 

 them at all ! At seventeen Haller went to Leyden to study 

 under Boerhaave, and under Albinus, a famous anatomist ; 

 and at nineteen he was already a doctor of medicine. Hav- 

 ing been driven out of Paris because the people were 

 horrified at his dissecting dead bodies, he went to Berne, 

 where he became professor of anatomy; and in 1736, when 

 George II. of England, who was also Elector of Hanover, 

 founded the University of Gottingen, he went there as pro- 

 fessor of anatomy, surgery, and botany, and soon made that 

 University as famous as Boerhaave had made that of Leyden. 

 One of his first reforms was to turn the work of his pupils 

 IS 



