32. The critical examination of the ancients, the establishment of gardens, the travels of botanists thus furnished a great supply of plants; it was now required to compare and arrange them. Gesner first undertook this; he had formed a garden of his own at Zurich, and has the credit of having discovered the true system of classifying plants according to the organs of fructification; which however he does not seem to have made known, nor were his botanical writings published till the last century. Gesner was the first who mentions the Indian Sugarcane and the Tobacco, as well as many indigenous plants. It is said that he was used to chew and smoke tobacco, "by which he rendered himself giddy and in a manner drunk (a).” As Gesner died in 1564, this carries back the knowledge of tobacco in Europe several years beyond the above-mentioned treatise of Benzoni.

33. Dodoens, or Dodonæus, a Dutch physician, in 1553, translated into his own language the history of plants by Fuchs, to which he added 133 figures. These, instead of using the alphabetical order of his predecessor, he arranged according to a method which he thought more natural. "He explains," says Sprengel, "well and learnedly the ancient botanists, and described many plants for the first time;" among these are the Ulex Europæus and the Hyacinthus non scriptus. The great aim of rendering the modern Materia Medica conformable to the ancient seems to have made the early botanists rather inattentive to objects before their eyes. Dodoens himself is rather a physician than a botanist, and is more diligent about the uses of plants than their characteristics. He collected all his writings, under the title Stirpium Historiæ Pemptades Sex, at Antwerp in 1583, with 1341 figures, a greater number than had yet been published.

34. The Stirpium Adversaria, by Pena and Lobel, the latter of whom is best known as a botanist, was published at London in 1570. Lobel indeed, though a native of Lille, having passed most of his life in England, may be fairly counted among our botanists. He had previously travelled much over Europe. “In the execution of this work," says Pulteney, "there is exhibited, I believe, the first sketch, rude as it is, of a natural method of

naturalist, who published an account of his travels in the Levant as early as 1581, he is mentioned as one of the first qui ait parlé de l'usage de boire du café, et en ait décrit la préparation avec exactitude. It is pos

sible that this book of Rauwolf being written in German, and the author being obscure in comparison with Prosper Alpinus, his prior claim has been till lately overlooked. (a) Sprengel, 373. 390.

arrangement, which however extends no farther than throwing the plants into large tribes, families, or orders, according to the external appearance or habit of the whole plant or flower, without establishing any definitions or characters. The whole forms forty-four tribes. Some contain the plants of one or two modern genera, others many, and some, it must be owned, very incongruous to each other. On the whole they are much superior to Dodoens's divisions (a)." Lobel's Adversaria contains descriptions of 1200 or 1500 plants with 272 engravings; the former are not clear or well expressed, and in this he is inferior to his contemporaries; the latter are on copper, very small, but neat (b). In a later work, the Plantarum Historia, Antwerp, 1576, the number of figures is very considerably greater, but the book has been less esteemed, being a sort of complement to the other. Sprengel speaks more highly of Lobel than the Biographie Universelle.

35. Clusius or Lécluse, born at Arras, and a traveller, like many other botanists, over Europe, till he settled at Leyden as professor of botany in 1593, is generally reckoned the greatest master of his science whom the age produced. His descriptions are remarkable for their exactness, precision, elegance, and method, though he seems to have had little regard to natural classification. He has added a long list to the plants already known. Clusius began by a translation of Dodoens into Latin; he published several other works within the century (c).

36. Cæsalpin was not only a botanist, but greater in this than in any other of the sciences he embraced. He was the first (the writings of Gesner, if they go so far, being in his time unpublished) who endeavoured to establish a natural order of classification on philosophical principles. He founded it on the number, figure, and position of the fructifying parts, observing the situation of the calix and flower relatively to the germen, the divisions of the former, and in general what has been regarded in later systems as the basis of arrangement. He treats of trees and of herbs separately, as two grand divisions, but under each follows his own natural system. The distinction of sexes he thought needless in plants, on account of their greater simplicity; though he admits it to exist in some, as in the hemp and the juniper. His treatise on Plants, in 1583, is divided into sixteen books; in the first of which he lays down the principles of vegetable anatomy and physiology.

(a) Historical Sketch, p. 102.

(6) Sprengel, 399.

(c) Sprengel, 407. Biogr. Univ. Pulteney.

Many ideas, says Du Petit Thouars, are found there of which the truth was long afterwards recognised. He analysed the structure of seeds, which he compares to the eggs of animals; an analogy, however, which had occurred to Empedocles among the ancients. "One page alone," the same writer observes," in the dedication of Cæsalpin to the Duke of Tuscany, concentrates the principles of a good botanical system so well, that notwithstanding all the labours of later botanists, nothing material could be added to his sketch, and if this one page out of all the writings of Casalpin remained, it would be enough to secure him an immortal reputation (a)." Cæsalpin unfortunately gave no figures of plants, which may have been among the causes that his system was so long overlooked.

37. The Historia Generalis Plantarum by Dalechamps, in 1587, contains 2731 figures, many of which, however, appear to be repetitions. These are divided into eighteen classes according to their form and size, but with no natural method. His work is imperfect and faulty; most of the descriptions are borrowed from his predecessors (b). Tabernæmontanus, in a book in the German language, has described 5800 species, and given 2480 figures (c). The Phytopinax of Gerard Bauhin (Basle, 1596) is the first important work of one who, in conjunction with his brother John, laboured for forty years in the advancement of botanical knowledge. It is a catalogue of 2460 plants, including, among about 250 others that were new, the first accurate description of the potato, which, as he informs us, was already cultivated in Italy (d).

38. Gerard's Herbal, published in 1597, was formed on the basis of Dodoens, taking in much from Lobel and Clusius; the figures are from the blocks used by Tabernæmontanus. It is not now esteemed at all by botanists, at least in this first edition; "but," says Pulteney, "from its being well timed, from its comprehending almost the whole of the subjects then known, by being written in English, and ornamented with a more numerous set of figures than had ever accompanied any work of the kind in this kingdom, it obtained great repute (e).

(a) Biogr. Univ. Sprengel, after giving an analysis of the system of Cæsalpin, concludes En primi systematis carpologici specimen, quod licet imperfectum sit, ingenii tamen summi monumentum et aliorum

omnium ad Gartnerium usque exemplar est, p. 430.

(b) Sprengel, 432.
(c) Id. 496.

(d) Id. 451.

Hist. Sketch, p. 122.

SECT. III.-ON ANATOMY AND MEDICINE.

Fallopius, Eustachius, and other Anatomists State of Medicine.

39. FEW Sciences were so successfully pursued in this period as that of anatomy. If it was impossible to snatch from Vesalius the pre-eminent glory that belongs to him as almost its creator, it might still be said that two men now appeared who, had they lived earlier, would probably have gone as far, and who, by coming later, were enabled to go beyond him. These were Fallopius and Eustachius, both Italians. The former is indeed placed by Sprengel even above Vesalius, and reckoned the first anatomist of the sixteenth century. No one had understood that delicate part of the human structure, the organ of hearing, so well as Fallopius, though even he left much for others. He added several to the list of muscles, and made some discoveries in the intestinal and generative organs (a).

40. Eustachius, though on the whole inferior to Fallopius, went beyond him in the anatomy of the ear, in which a canal, as is well known, bears his name. One of his biographers has gone so far as to place him above every anatomist for the number of his discoveries. He has treated very well of the teeth, a subject little understood before, and was the first to trace the vena azygos through all its ramifications. No one before had exhibited the structure of the human kidneys, Vesalius having examined them only in dogs (6). The scarcity of human subjects was in fact an irresistible temptation to take upon trust the identity between quadrupeds and man, which misled the great anatomists of the sixteenth century (c). Comparative anatomy was therefore not yet promoted to its real dignity, both as an indispensable part of natural history, and as opening the most conclusive and magnificent views of teleology. Coiter, an anatomist born in Holland, but who passed his life in Italy, Germany, and France, was perhaps

(a) Portal. Sprengel, Hist. de la Méde- living criminal to the anatomists, quem incine.

(6) Portal.

(c) The church had a repugnance to permit the dissection of dead bodies, but Fallopius tells us that the Duke of Tuscany was sometimes obliging enough to send a

terficimus nostro modo et anatomisamus. Sprengel suggests that "nostro modo" meant by opium; but this seems to be merely a conjecture. Hist. de la Médecine, iv. 11.

the first to describe the skeletons of several animals; though Belon, as we have seen, had views far beyond his age in what is strictly comparative anatomy. Coiter's work bears the date of 1575; in 1566 he had published one on human osteology, where that of the foetus is said to be first described, though some attribute this merit to Fallopius. Coiter is called in the Biographie Universelle one of the creators of pathological anatomy.

41. Columbus (De Re Anatomica, Venice, 1559) the successor of Vesalius at Padua, and afterwards professor at Pisa and Rome, has announced the discovery of several muscles, and given the name of vomer to the small bone which sustains the cartilage of the nose, and which Vesalius had taken for a mere process of the sphenoid. Columbus, though too arrogant in censuring his great predecessor, generally follows him (a). Arantius, in 1571, is among the first who made known the anatomy of the gravid uterus, and the structure of the foetus (b). He was also conversant, as Vidius, a professor at Paris of Italian birth, as early as 1542, had already been, with the anatomy of the brain. But this was much improved by Varoli in his Anatomia, published in 1573, who traced the origin of the optic nerves, and gave a better account than any one before him of the eye and of the voice. Piccolomini (Anatomiæ Prælectiones, 1586) is one of the first who described the cellular tissue, and in other respects has made valuable observations. Ambrose Paré, a French surgeon, is deemed the founder of chirurgic science, at least in that country. His works were first collected in 1561; but his treatise on gunshot wounds is as old as 1545. Several other names are mentioned with respect by the historians of medicine and anatomy; such as those of Alberti, Benivieni, Donatus, and Schank. Never, says Portal, were anatomy and surgery better cultivated, with more emulation or more encouragement, than about the end of the sixteenth century. A long list of minor discoveries in the human frame are recorded by this writer and by Sprengel. It will be readily understood that we give these names, which of itself it is rather an irksome labour to enumerate, with no other object than that none of those who by their ability and diligence carried forward the landmarks of human knowledge, should miss, in a history of general literature, of their meed of remembrance. We reserve to the next volume those

(a) Portal, i. 541.

(6) Portal, vol. ii. p. 3.