154 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



the anatomy of one type, and to avoid vain and argumen- 

 tative digressions by the way. And it is significant 

 that whenever the author turns aside from this high 

 determination, he becomes involved in disaster. Thus 

 Vesalius in a parenthesis on the skull of the crocodile tells 

 us that the lower jaw is fixed and that the upper jaw 

 moves — a statement which recalls an equally misguided 

 belief on the part of Oliver Goldsmith. Ruini, in his 

 turn, becomes entangled in a greater snare when he 

 describes a backward flow of blood along the veins. 

 Ruini' s work, as we should expect from the cumbrous 

 nature of his subject, is more topographical than 

 Vesalius', but as far as possible he goes through the 

 animal system by system in the same patient and 

 exhaustive manner. We know the anxiety of Vesalius to 

 secure the best illustrations available at the time, how 

 he employed a pupil of Titian's to make the drawings 

 and engrave them on wood, and how he indulged a 

 whimsical, and not always amiable, fancy of throwing 

 his figures into attitudes and providing them with a 

 rustic setting. In all this Ruini is his close, and not 

 always successful, imitator, although the last figure of 

 the muscles of the horse in Book V. is a work with distinct 

 artistic feeling. You have only to compare it with any 

 of the pirated copies engraved on copper to realise, in 

 spite of its coarseness, the superior merit of the original 

 figure. Both anatomists suffered from scandalous and 

 shameless plagiarism. Their successors, lacking the 

 ability to excel or to extend, frankly adopted the 

 infamous alternative of theft. There are several pirated 

 French versions of Ruini, including the Perfect 

 Cavalier, and Saunier's Complete Knowledge of the 

 Horse. In England, Snape's Anatomy of an Horse, first 

 published in 1683, is little more than a plagiarised 



