24 THE KIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



doctrine, was destroyed by the new cosmic system of 

 Copernicus, that the knowledge of the human frame 

 entered upon a new period of progress. The great 

 anatomists, Vasalius (of Brussels), and Eustachius 

 and Fallopius (of Modena), advanced the knowledge 

 of our bodily structure so much by their own thorough 

 investigations that little remained for their numerous 

 followers to do, with regard to the more obvious 

 phenomena, except the substantiation of details. 

 Andreas Yesalius, as courageous as he was talented 

 and indefatigable, was the pioneer of the movement ; 

 he completed in his twenty-eighth year (1543) that 

 great and systematic work, De humani corporis fabrica ; 

 he gave to the whole of human anatomy a new and 

 independent scope, and a more solid foundation. On 

 that account he was, at a later date, at Madrid — where 

 he was physician to Charles V. and Philip II. — 

 condemned to death by the Inquisition as a magician. 

 He only escaped by undertaking a pilgrimage to Jeru- 

 salem; in returning he suffered shipwreck on the 

 Isle of Zante, and died there in misery and destitu- 

 tion. 



The great merit of the nineteenth century, as far as 

 our knowledge of the human frame is concerned, lies in 

 the founding of two new lines of research of immense 

 importance — comparative anatomy and histology, or 

 microscopic anatomy. The former was intimately 

 associated with human anatomy from the very. begin- 

 ning ; indeed, it had to supply the place of the latter 

 so long because the dissection of human corpses was 

 a crime visited with capital punishment — that was the 

 case even in the fifteenth century! But the many 

 anatomists of the next three centuries devoted them- 

 selves mainly to a more accurate study of the human 



