IX THE HISTORY AND SCOPE OF ZOOLOGY 357 



and of the controversies connected with, it gives 

 an interesting and sufficient presentation of the 

 anatomico - physiological knowledge of the period. 

 The foundation of the scientific academies and the 

 records of their publications furnish thenceforward 

 a picture of the progress in this study. As an 

 early anatomist Willis (1621-1675), professor of 

 physic in Oxford, deserves notice for his work on the 

 anatomy of the human brain, the plates for which 

 were drawn by young Christopher Wren, the prodigy 

 of Oxford common-rooms, who later built St. Paul's 

 Cathedral. The Eoyal Society, in its early days when 

 Wren was a fellow, met at Gresham College whenever 

 the professor of physic there could obtain a human 

 body for dissection, and amongst its earliest records 

 are the memoirs of Tyson on the anatomy of the 

 Chimpanzee and the experiments on transfusion of 

 blood, extirpation of the spleen, and such like inquiries. 

 Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) and Anton van 

 Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) were the first to introduce 

 the microscope into anatomical research. Malpighi 

 first used the injection of blood-vessels on a large scale, 

 and moreover is to be credited with having first con- 

 ceived that there is a definite relation of the structure 

 of lower kinds of animals to that of higher and more 

 elaborate kinds, and that this relation is one of gradual 

 transition, so that lower animals are not to be regarded 

 as isolated and arbitrary existences, but are really 

 simpler exhibitions of the same kind of structure and 

 mechanism which occurs in higher animals. It is this 

 conception which later developed into the theory of 



