820 EVENING DISCOURSES. 



had as a friend and pupil Marcellus Malpighi, and where he taught publicly his 

 doctrines and the results of his investigations, and also wrote a large part of his 

 great work De Motu Animalium. Twelve years later he returned to Messina, 

 which he left as an exile in 1674, and went to Rome, where he lived for a time under 

 the patronage of that remarkable woman, Queen Christina of Sweden. The 

 decennium passed in Pisa was the most brilliant period of his scientific life. Here 

 he had as pupils Marcellus Malpighi, who dedicated to him his famous treatise 

 De Pulmonibus ; and also Lorenzo Bellini, whose name still survives in the tubules 

 of the kidney. Borelli was one of the founders of the famous Accademia del 

 Cimento. His home in Pisa was at once a ' domo,' and also perhaps the first 

 physical and biological laboratory in Europe. Here also was taught ' Anatomia in 

 domo Borelli ' by Claudius Anterius. The Grand Duke of Tuscany himself saw 

 that he was supplied with the necessary animals for his experiments. The 

 problems of animal motion presented a field for the application of the new methods 

 of physical research which had been established by the labours of Galileo and his 

 fellow-workers. The investigations of movements as manifested by animals and 

 man was a large part, but not the only part, of his life-work. His researches were 

 published in his epoch-making book De Motu Animalium, the first volume in 1680 

 — two years after his death — and the second in 1681. 



Borelli applied to living beings the laws of mechanics, and he reduced to its 

 simplest form the theory of animal locomotion. He recognised that these move- 

 ments 'are due to mechanical causes, instruments, and reasons.' Mathematician, 

 geometrician, astronomer, and physicist, and the first physiologist of his time, 

 Borelli combined in his life-work the happy marriage of geometry with physiology. 

 Just as Harvey's work recorded in ' il libello d' oro ' was the compliment to the 

 anatomical period of the sixteenth century and the labours of Vesalius, so Borelli's 

 monumental work continued that of Harvey, and co-ordinated and brought into 

 relation other functions of the body. Over twenty years of his life were spent in 

 Messina, and when he quitted Sicily he found refuge in Rome. Robbed by his 

 servant of practically all his belongings, old, infirm, and poor, he found in the last 

 years of his life a peaceful resting-place amongst the Fathers in the Collegio di 

 San Pantaleone dei Padri delle Scuole Pie, and it was these Padri who found the 

 money and published his monumental work of 900 quarto pages, illustrated by 

 nineteen magnificent plates crowded with artistic and vigorous delineations. 



The comparison of animals with machines is both legitimate and suggestive, 

 and, indeed, it is a very fertile, if trite, idea, and the justice of the comparison 

 becomes far more apparent now than in the days when Borelli unravelled living 

 mechanisms as a problem in animal mechanics. At the end of the seventeenth 

 century the chemical aspect of the question was just dawning. A rational 

 chemistry was springing out of the work and dreams of the alchemists. The time 

 had not arrived for the consideration of living organisms as ' chemical machines,' 

 consisting essentially of colloid materials, which possess the peculiarities of auto- 

 matically developing, preserving, and reproducing themselves, to use the words 

 of Jacques Loeb in his most suggestive lectures on ' The Dynamics of Living 

 Matter.' There were, however, prophets in the land, and not the least interesting 

 of these is Dr. Samuel Johnson himself, who appears in a new role as the prophet 

 of man's conquest of the air. In ' Rasselas ' he makes his hero say : ' I have long 

 been of opinion that, instead of the tardy conveyance of ships and chariots, man 

 might use the swifter migration of wings, that the fields of air are open to know- 

 ledge, and that only ignorance and idleness need crawl upon the ground.' We 

 also find Victor Hugo among the prophets. In 1864, writing on the subject of 

 aerial navigation, the poet expresses the opinion that the flying machine of the 

 future will be the ' helicoptere,' that it will be ' heavier than the air.' It was to 

 be the bird flying where it listeth, while the balloon he compared to the clouds, 

 wafted, driven, and tossed by the winds at their will. Looking at a balloon in the 

 air one day, he said to Arago : ' See the egg soars. The bird has yet to come. But 

 the bird is within, and it will be hatched.' To-day the prophecy has been fulfilled. 



Borelli took all animal movements for his province, and dealt both with 

 external visible movements and movements of internal organs with voluntary 

 and involuntary movements. The various types of terrestrial locomotion he not 

 unsuccessfully compared to the methods by which a boatman directs a boat. He 

 studied the stability and displacement of a fish, and illustrates by an original 



