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THE discoveries in physics soon reacted on the progress of 

 physiology. A knowledge of these discoveries was rapidly pro- 

 pagated through these societies. There was one who wove the 

 facts of the new physics into his conception of the universe and who 

 exerted a profound influence on human thought, viz., REN& 

 DESCARTES. He was born at La Haye in 1596, but spent the 

 greater part of his life outside France, and died in Stockholm in 1650. 

 We shall speak of him again in connection with the nervous system. 

 Considering man as a machine, he tried to show how, just as the 

 universe is a machine working according to physical laws, so also is 

 man. An earthly machine, machine de terre, governed by a rational 

 soul (dme raisonnable), which has its seat in the pineal gland. 



His treatise De Homine Liber (1662) is in reality a treatise 

 on physiology. It deals chiefly with the mode of action of the soul, 

 but it gives a general view of all the functions of the body as they 

 appeared to Descartes. He accepted Harvey's view of the passage of 

 the blood from the arteries to the veins in the systemic circulation, 

 but he did not accept the contraction or systole of the ventricles as 

 the efficient factor in the propulsion of the blood. For him, the heart 

 was expanded by its own innate heat. The great apostle of the 

 application of physical laws to the elucidation and explanation of 

 function both in man and animals was Borelli, whose mathematical 

 genius led him to the study of physics, and from physics to 

 physiology. 



GIOVANNI ALPHONSO 

 BORELLI. 



1608-1679. 



BORELLI, born of humble parentage at Naples in 1608, by his 

 mathematical and physical studies, exerted a great influence on 

 the progress of physiology, and founded a school, the iatro- 

 mechanical, as distinguished from and opposed to the iatro-chemical. 

 His learning as a mathematician secured him the Chair of Mathe- 

 matics in the University of Messina, probably about 1640. He took 

 a wide interest in phenomena outside his own specific studies. He 

 wrote an account of the pestilence which raged in Sicily in 1647-48. 

 Pisa and Padua were always in healthy rivalry. Borelli's fame led to 

 his " call " by Ferdinand, Duke of Tuscany, to fill the Chair of Mathe- 

 matics in Pisa. By an accident almost, as it were, the advent of 

 Marcellus Malpighi in Pisa in 1656, brought Malpighi and Borelli 

 together ; and now Borelli took up the study of anatomical subjects. 



