380 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIV. No. 1399 



logically, witli terse comTnents and compact 

 data on as mucli of their work as is relevant. 

 TMs involves tireless research and great biblio- 

 graphic resources, and is an instance of what 

 we like to regard as typical German scholar- 

 ship. The illustrations were supplied by a pub- 

 lisher, Eudolph Weigel, personally devoted to 

 the graphic arts, who " came to love this enter- 

 prise." They are well executed woodcuts, copied 

 from important and generally rare originals, 

 and since the pages are usually foxed, the book 

 itself, though not old, has the flavor of an- 

 tiquity. That it would suffer from an artistic 

 standpoint in' an American edition would be 

 expected, and such is indeed the case. The 

 miniatures in color and the red-chalk drawing 

 are replaced by gray half-tones, many more of 

 which with their muddy backgrounds and occa- 

 sional obscurity of essential details have been 

 introduced. The woodcut facsimiles in Chou- 

 lant appear as " process " line-drawings, since 

 it was recognized that this would give better 

 results than photographic copies from worn 

 and library-stamped originals. 



Dr. Mortimer Frank has made a very able 

 translation, rendering into English not only 

 the German text, but Latin, Italian and other 

 quotations. He has expanded greatly the 

 accounts of certain authors, increasing that 

 of Mondino, for example, by seven pages; and 

 owing to Sudhoff's researches he could supple- 

 ment Choulant's brief treatment of early 

 manuscript illustrations by a large and sep- 

 arate chapter, which becomes discursive and 

 quite different from Choulant's work. It raises 

 the question whether the Alexandrian school 

 of anatomy produced anatomical drawings, now 

 lost, which were the source of the crude figures 

 found in Provengal, Persian and Thibetan 

 manuscripts. These figures have in common, 

 among other things, a sitting or straddling 

 posture ; all of them may have come, according 

 to Cowdry's recent publication, from still 

 earlier Chinese sources, but the drawings which 

 he has found to substantiate this show little 

 more of anatomy than a strange posture. It 

 seems probable, however, that anatomical illus- 

 tration had a long history before the renais- 

 sance, little of which may ever be known. The 



medieval pictures show further that Jacobus 

 Sylvius was not without some justification in 

 making Ms great mistake, namely that because 

 the physician must, as he said, view and handle 

 the body, anatomical pictures would always be 

 a hindrance " serving only to gratify the eyes 

 of silly women." ^ Thus one very able anato- 

 mist lost a place in any history of anatomic 

 art, but it seems unnecessarily severe to de- 

 scribe bis pupil's achievements as " tremend- 

 ous and limitless " ; nor should the anatomist 

 Marc' Antonio Delia Torre, who employed 

 Leonardo for making illustrations, be lost in 

 the effulgence, when Leonardo " steps to a 

 place of intolerant central glory." 



Great anatomists who neither made pictures 

 nor had them made for them, are rigidly de- 

 barred; whereas others of relatively slender 

 attainments but given to pictorial illustration 

 appear of magnified importance. N^one more 

 so than Casserius, whose ornate drawings of 

 the vocal organs of all creatures from sheep to 

 crickets, in folio plates with floral festoons and 

 turnip embellishments, mark the beginning of 

 the " fourth period." Count is made, however, 

 from his work on general human anatomy. 

 Concerning the Casserian plate chosen by Dr. 

 Frank to replace an immodest selection in 

 Choulant, Dr. Garrison writes as follows : 



It represents an. eviscerated female figure, of 

 lovely proportions, apparently floating in mid-air, 

 in. the rapt, ecstatic attitude of some transfigura- 

 tion scene of Raphael or Corregio. In sheer beauty, 

 this figure is comparable with the robust goddesses 

 in the Aurora Fresco of Guide Eeni in the Rospi- 

 gliosi Palace at Rome. 



A comely woman, surely, but one attached to 

 earth though her feet are below the limit of 

 the picture! On the whole we prefer the de- 

 scription of these plates by Holmes, written 

 with his poetic license 'and abandon: 



In the giant folio of SpigeUus lovely ladies dis- 

 play their viscera with a coquettish grace implying 

 that it is rather a pleasure than otherwise to show 

 the lace-like omentum, and hold up their appen- 

 dices epiploicsB as if they were saying, " these are 

 our jewels." 



1 Dr. Frank Baker in the Johns Hopkins Hos- 

 pital Bulletin, Vol. XX., 1909, p. 332. 



