THE EARLY DAYS OF COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 153 



overwhelmed by the misery of doubt and distraction. 

 Yet it must not be concluded that he failed to achieve 

 results both interesting and important. He compares 

 the skeleton of the limb of the horse and man, and 

 corrects the old and natural blunder of the position of 

 the knee and elbow. He writes on the comparative 

 anatomy of the hyoid bone and of the gut, and I ought 

 specially to mention his striking work on the comparative 

 anatomy of the eye, ear and larynx, published at Venice 

 in the year 1600, in which he compares in detail the 

 skeleton and muscles in a number of animals, mostly 

 mammals. He was a skilled, and almost a great, 

 technician, and if we are to distinguish in these early 

 days between a zootomist and a comparative anatomist, 

 Fabricius must be assigned an honourable position 

 among the first explorers of the former school. 



V. 



But the sixteenth century reserved for its close the 

 brightest achievement of an awakening science. As if 

 anatomy were in the air there appeared at Paris in 

 1594 a small and imperfect treatise by Jean Heroard on 

 the osteology of the horse, and almost immediately 

 afterwards Carlo Ruini, a senator of Bologna, issued 

 his volume on the anatomy and diseases of the same 

 animal. It is to be regarded as the logical outcome of 

 the Vesalian tradition, and it resembles, but does not 

 equal, the masterpiece of the founder of anatomy in 

 almost every detail. Like the Fabrica of Yesalius, it set 

 a standard which posterity could only approach by 

 working up painfully to it from below. 



It is instructive to the genius of a speculative age to 

 trace the parallel between these two works. In both 

 cases we observe an inflexible determination to exhaust 



