THE GENERAL CONSTITUTION OF LIVING BEINGS. 63 
regarding the inner composition of organs, the structure 
and development of their deepest and most delicate parts, 
the curious properties of those infinitely tiny corpuscles 
that group together to make up living beings. The prob- 
lems of life stand forth in such studies in all their grandeur, 
all their mystery and charm. ‘The silent revelations of the 
microscope are here associated with the eloquent language 
of experiments on the animal frame. All the complexities 
of chemistry here give their aid to expositions which are 
but the more convincing for their extreme positiveness. 
And medicine itself, if it would escape stagnation, is forced 
to ask from such studies the key to riddles never answered 
by any power of empiricism. ‘These words describe fully 
enough the interest that must attend a complete picture of 
the present condition of general anatomy. 
I. 
General anatomy has been created only of late days. 
Ancient anatomists, limiting their studies to the examina- 
tion of the surface of organs, neglected to explore their 
depths. Besides, they were long forced to do without that 
instrument, most indispensable in this kind of investigation, 
the microscope. During the period beginning with Heroph- 
ilus and Erasistratus, who flourished three hundred years be- 
fore the Christian era, and who are the real founders of de- 
scriptive anatomy of the human body, extending down to 
Galen, and from Galen onward, including the time of Vesa- 
lius, the main subject of anatomy was formed nearly as a 
complete body. A great number of points that remained ob- 
scure were afterward cleared up by Bérenger de Carpi, Mas- 
sa, Servet, Sylvius, who discovered the valves of the veins; 
Kustachi, who found the tube and valve named after him; 
Varolus, who examined the brain; Botal, Bauhin, Cesalpi- 
nus, Fabricius of Aquapendente, and a host of others, who, 
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, produced in en- 
