THE ARREST OF INQUIRY. qj 



sacru, and may remind us of Descartes' fanciful loca- 

 tion of the soul in the minute cone-like part of the 

 brain known as the conarium, or pineal gland. On 

 some baseless charge of attempting the dissection of 

 a living subject, the Inquisition haled Vesalius to 

 prison, and would have put him to death " as merci- 

 fully as possible," but for the intervention of King 

 Charles V. of Spain, to whom Vesalius had been 

 physician. Returning in October, 1564, from a pil- 

 grimage taken, presumably, as atonement for his 

 alleged offence, he was shipwrecked on the coast of 

 Zante, and died of exhaustion. 



While the heretical character and tendencies of 

 discoveries in astronomy and anatomy awoke active 

 opposition from the Church, the work of men of the 

 type of Gesner, the eminent Swiss naturalist, and of 

 Caesalpino, professor of botany at Padua, passed 

 unquestioned. No dogma was endangered by the 

 classification of plants and animals. But when a 

 couple of generations after the death of Copernicus 

 had passed, the Inquisition found a second victim 

 in the famous Galileo, who was born at Pisa in 1 564. 

 After spending some years in mechanical and mathe- 

 matical pursuits, he began a series of observations 

 in confirmation of the Copernican theory, of the truth 

 of which he had been convinced in early life. With 

 the aid of a rude telescope, made by his own hands, 

 he discovered the satellites of Jupiter; the moon- 

 like phases of Venus and Mars; mountains and val- 

 leys in the moon; spots on the sun's disk; and the 



