said to have first used and numeral expo parish schoolmaster, should have been overlooked by men of extraordinary acuteness, like Tartaglia, Cardan, and Ferrari, and hardly less so, that, by dint of this acuteness, they dispensed with the aid of these contrivances, in which we almost fancy the utility of algebraic expression consists. the known term is the product of all the | Nuremberg, 1544, is roots. Nor was he ignorant of a method the signs + and of extracting roots by approximation; but nents of powers.* It is very singular in this, again, the definiteness of solution, that discoveries of the greatest convewhich numerical problems admit and re-nience, and not above the ingenuity of a quire, would prevent any great progress from being made. The rules are not, perhaps, all laid down by him very clearly; and it is to be observed that he confined himself chiefly to equations not above the third power; though he first published the method of solving biquadratics, invented by his coadjutor Ferrari. Cossali has also shown that the applica- 7. But the great boast of science during tion of algebra to geometry, and even to this period is the treatise of Co- Copernicus. the geometrical construction of problems, pernicus on the revolutions of was known in some cases by Tartaglia the heavenly bodies, in six books, publish and Cardan; thus plucking another feath-ed at Nuremberg in 1543. This founder er from the wing of Vieta or of Descartes. It is a little amusing to see that, after Montucla had laboured with so much success to despoil Harriott of the glory which Wallis had, perhaps with too national a feeling, bestowed upon him for a long list of discoveries contained in the writings of Vieta, a claimant by an older title started up in Jerome Cardan, who, by help of his very accomplished advocate, seems to have established his right at the expense of both. 6. These anticipations of Cardan are Imperfections the more truly wonderful, when of algebraic we consider that the symbolilanguage. cal language of algebra, that powerful instrument not only in expediting the processes of thought, but in suggesting general truths to the mind, was nearly unknown in his age. Diophantus, Fra Luca, and Cardan make use occasionally of letters to express indefinite quantities, besides the res or cosa, sometimes written shortly, for the assumed unknown number of an equation. But letters were not substituted for known quantities; and it has been seen in a note, that Tartaglia first discovered, and that by a geometrical construction, what appears so very simple as the equation between the cube of a line and that of any two parts into which it may be divided. Michael Stifel, in his Arithmetica Integra, knowledge of this property of the coefficients of the second term, that Cardan recognised the existence of equal roots, even when affected by the same sign (Cossali, ii., 362); which, considered in relation to the numerical problems then in use, would seem a kind of absurdity. of modern astronomy was born at Thorn, of a good family, in 1473; and, after receiving the best education his country furnished, spent some years in Italy, rendering himself master of all the mathematical and astronomical science at that time attainable. He became possessed, afterward, of an ecclesiastical benefice in his own country. It appears to have been about 1507, that, after meditating on various schemes besides the Ptolemaic, he began to adopt and confirm in writing that of Pythagoras, as alone capable of explaining the planetary motions with that simplicity which gives a presumption of truth in the works of nature. Many years of exact observation confirmed his mind in the persuasion that he had solved the grandest problem which can occupy the astronomer. He seems to have completed his treaty about 1530, but perhaps dreaded the bigoted prejudices which afterward oppressed Galileo. Hence he is * Hutton. Kästner. + The title page and advertisement of so famous a work, and which so few of my readers will have seen, are worth copying from Kastner, i, 595. Nicolai Copernici Torinensis, de revolutionibus orbium cœlestium libri vi. Habes in hoc opere jam recens nato et edito, stuerraticarum, cum ex veteribus tum etiam ex recendiose lector, motus stellarum tam fixarum quam tibus observationibus restitutos; et novis insuper ac admirabilibus hypothesibus ornatos. Habes etiam tabulas expeditissimas, ex quibus eosdem ad quodvis tempus quam facillime calculare poteris. Igitur eme, lege, fruere. Aуεwμεтρптоs оVČELS ELOLTO. Noriberga, apud Joh. Petreium, anno MDxlii. This is the proper statement of the Copernican argument, as it then stood; it rested on what we may call a metaphysical probability, founded upon Kästner, p. 161. In one place Cossali shows its beauty and simplicity; for it is to be rememberthat Cardan had transported all the quantities of aned that the Ptolemaic hypothesis explained all the equation to one side, making the whole equal to zero; which Wallis has ascribed to Harriott, as his leading discovery, p. 324. Yet in another passage we find Cossali saying, Una somma di quantità uguale al zero avea un' aria mostruosa, e non sapeasi di equazion si fatta concepire idea, p. 159. phenomena then known. Those which are only to be solved by the supposition of the earth's motion were discovered long afterward. This excuses the slow reception of the new system, interfering, as it did, with so many prejudices, and incapable of that kind of proof which mankind generally demand. careful to propound his theory as an hypothesis; though it is sufficiently manifest that he did not doubt of its truth. It was first publicly announced by his disciple Joachim Rhoticus, already mentioned for his trigonometry, in the Narratio de Revolutionibus Copernici, printed at Dantzic in 1540. The treatise of Copernicus himself, three years afterward, is dedicated to the pope Paul III., as if to shield himself under that sacred mantle. But he was better protected by the common safeguard against oppression. The book reached him on the day of his death; and he just touched with his hands the great legacy he was to bequeath to mankind. But many years were to elapse before they availed themselves of the wisdom of Copernicus. The progress of his system, even among astronomers, as we shall hereafter see, was exceedingly slow. We may just mention here, that no kind of progress was made in mechanical or optical science during the first part of the sixteenth century. Greek SECTION II. On Medicine and Anatomy. 8. THE revival of classical literature had Revival of an extensive influence, where we might not immediately anticipate medicine. it, on the science of medicine. Jurisprudence itself, though nominally and exclusively connected with the laws of Rome, was hardly more indebted to the restorers of ancient learning than the art of healing, which seems to own no mistress but nature, no code of laws but those which regulate the human system. But the Greeks, among their other vast superiorities above the Arabians, who borrowed so much, and so much perverted what they borrowed, were not only the real founders, but the best teachers of medicine; a science which in their hands seems, more than any other, to have an * Gassendi, Vita Copernici. Biog. Univ. Montucla. Kästner. Playfair. Gassendi, p. 14-22, gives a short analysis of the great work of Copernicus de orbium cœlestium revolutionibus, p. 22. The hypothesis is generally laid down in the first of the six books. One of the most remarkable passages in Copernicus is his conjecture that gravitation was not a central tendency, as had been sup: posed, but an attraction common to matter, and probably extending to the heavenly bodies, though it does not appear that he surmised their mutual influences in virtue of it: gravitatem esse affectionem non terræ totius, sed partium ejus propriam, qualem soli etiam et lunæ cæterisque astris convenire credibile est. These are the words of Copernicus himself, quoted by Gassendi, p. 19. ticipated the Baconian philosophy; being founded on an induction proceeding by select experience, always observant, always cautious, and ascending slowly to the generalities of theory. But, instead of Hippocrates and Galen, the Arabians brought in physicians of their own-men, doubtless, of considerable, though inferior merit-and substituted arbitrary or empirical precepts for the enlarged philosophy of the Greeks. The scholastic subtilty also obtruded itself even into medicine; and the writings of the middle ages on these subjects are alike barbarous in style and useless in substance. Pharmacy owes much to this Oriental school, but it has retained no reputation in physiological or pathological science. Our 9. Nicolas Leonicenus, who became professor at Ferrara before 1470, was Linacre the first restorer of the Hippocrat- and other ic method of practice. He lived physicians, to a very advanced age, and was the first translator of Galen from the Greek. excellent countryman, Linacre, did almost as much for medicine. The College of Physicians, founded by Henry VIII. in 1518, venerates him as its original president. His primary object was to secure a learned profession, to rescue the art of healing from mischievous ignorance, and to guide the industrious student in the path of real knowledge, which at that time lay far more through the regions of ancient learning than at present. It was important, not for the mere dignity of the profession, but for its proper ends, to encourage the cultivation of the Greek language, or to supply its want by accurate versions of the chief medical writers.† Linacre himself, and several eminent physicians on the Continent, Cop, Ruel, Gonthier, Fuchs, by such labours in translation, restored the school of Hippocrates. That of the Arabians rapidly lost ground, though it preserved through the sixteenth century an ascendancy in Spain; and some traces of its influence, especially the precarious empiricism of judging diseases by the renal secretion, without sight of the patient, which was very general in that age, continued long afterward in several parts of Europe.t 10. The study of Hippocrates taught the medical writers of this century to Medical inobserve and describe like him. novators. Their works-chiefly, indeed, after the period with which we are immediately concerned-are very numerous, and some of Biogr. Univ. Sprengel, Hist. de la Médicine (traduit par Jourdan), vol. ii. + Johnson's Life of Linacre, p. 207, 279. Biogr. Britann. + Sprengel, vol. iii., passim. them deserve much praise, though neither | is hard to strip one so much superior to the theory of the science nor the power him as Vesalius of that honour.* of judiciously observing and describing 12. Every early anatomist was left far was yet in a very advanced state. The behind when Vesalius, a native of Vesalius. besetting sin of all who should have la- Brussels, who acquired in early boured for truth, an undue respect for au- youth an extraordinary reputation on this thority, made Hippocrates and Galen, side of the Alps, and in 1540 became proespecially the former, as much the idols fessor of the science at Pavia, published of the medical world as Augustin and Aris- at Basle, in 1543, his great work de Cortotle were of theology and metaphysics. poris humani Fabrica. If Vesalius was This led to a pedantic erudition, and con-not quite to anatomy what Copernicus tempt of opposite experience, which rendered the professors of medicine an inexhaustible theme of popular ridicule. Some, however, even at an early time, broke away from the trammels of implicit obedience to the Greek masters. Fernel, one of the first physicians in France, rejecting what he could not approve in their writings, gave an example of free inquiry. Argentier of Turin tended to shake the influence of Galen by founding a school which combated many of his leading theories. But the most successful opponent of the orthodox creed was Paracelsus. Of Paracelsus. his speculative philosophy, or, rather, the wild chimeras which he borrowed or devised, enough has been said in former pages. His reputation was originally founded on a supposed skill in medicine; and it is probable that, independently of his real merit in the application of chymistry to medicine, and in the employment of very powerful agents, such as antimony, the fanaticism of his pretended philosophy would exercise that potency over the bodily frame to which disease has, in recent experience, so often yielded.+ 11. The first important advances in anAnatomy, atomical knowledge since the time Berenger. of Mundinus were made by Berenger of Carpi, in his commentary upon that author, printed at Bologna in 1521, which it was thought worth while to translate into English as late as 1664, and in his Isagogæ breves in anatomiam, Bologna, 1522. He followed the steps of Mundinus in human dissection, and thus gained an advantage over Galen. Hence we owe to him the knowledge of several specific differences between the human structure and that of quadrupeds. Berenger is asserted to have discovered two of the small bones of the ear, though this is contested on behalf of Achillini. Portal observes, that though some have regarded Berenger as the restorer of the science of anatomy, it *Sprengel, iii., 204. "Argentier," he says, "was the first to lay down a novel and true principle, that the different faculties of the soul are not inherent in certain distinct parts of the brain." + Sprengel, vol. iii. was to astronomy, he has yet been said, a little hyperbolically, to have discovered a new world. A superstitious prejudice against human dissection had restrained the ancient anatomists, in general, to pigs and apes, though Galen, according to Portal, had some experience in the former. Mundinus and Berenger, by occasionally dissecting the human body, had thrown much additional light on its structure; and the superficial muscles, those immediately under the integuments, had been studied by Da Vinci and others for the purposes of painting and sculpture. Vesalius first gave a complete description of the human body with designs, which, at the time, were ascribed to Titian. We have here, therefore, a great step made in science: the precise estimation of Vesalius's discoveries must be sought, of course, in anatomical history.† 13. "Vesalius," says Portal, in the rapturous strain of one devoted to his Portal's own science, "appears to me one account of the greatest men who ever ex- of him. isted. Let the astronomers vaunt their Copernicus, the natural philosophers their Galileo and Torricelli, the mathematicians their Pascal, the geographers their Columbus, I shall always place Vesalius above all their heroes. The first study for man is man. Vesalius has had this noble object in view, and has admirably attained it; he has made on himself and his fellows such discoveries as Columbus could only make by travelling to the extremity of the world. The discoveries of Vesalius are of direct importance to man: by acquiring fresh knowledge of his own structure, man seems to enlarge his existence; while discoveries in geography or astronomy affect him but in a very indirect manner." He proceeds to compare him with Winslow, in order to show how Hist. de l'anatomie, i., 277. Portal remarks in his preface, p. xii, that many discoveries, supposed to be modern, may be detected in the old anatomists; thus Berenger knew that the thorax is larger in man, and the pelvis in woman, which a liv ing anatomist, he says, has assumed as his own. But the Greek sculptors surely knew this as well as Berenger or Portal. † Portal, i., 394-433. little had been done in the intermediate | cipation of Harvey. Portal has erronetime. Vesalius seems not to have known ously supposed the celebrated passage of the osteology of the ear. His account of Servetus on the circulation of the blood to the teeth is not complete; but he first be contained in his book de Trinitatis erclearly described the bones of the feet. roribus, published in 1531,† whereas it is He has given a full account of the mus- really found in the Christianismi restitucles, but with some mistakes, and was ig- tio, which did not appear till 1553. This norant of a very few. In his account of gives Levasseur a priority of some impor the sanguineous and nervous systems, the tance in anatomical history. errors seem more numerous. He describes the intestines better than his predecessors, and the heart very well; the organs of generation not better than they, and sometimes omits their discoveries; the brain admirably, little having since been added. 14. The zeal of Vesalius and his fellowHis human students for anatomical science dissections. led them to strange scenes of adventure. Those services, which have since been thrown on the refuse of mankind, they voluntarily undertook. Entire affection scorneth nicer hands. They prowled by night in charnel-houses; they dug up the dead from the grave; they climbed the gibbet, in fear and silence, to steal the mouldering carcass of the murderer; the risk of ignominious punishment, and the secret stings of superstitious remorse, exalting, no doubt, the delight of these useful but not very enviable pursuits.* 15. It may be mentioned here, that VeFate of salius, after living for some years Vesalius. in the court of Charles and Philip as their physician, met with a strange reverse, characteristic enough of such a place. Being absurdly accused of having dissected a Spanish gentleman before he was dead, Vesalius only escaped capital punishment, at the instance of the Inquisition, by undertaking a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, during which he was shipwrecked, and died of famine in one of the Greek islands.† 16. The best anatomists were found in Other Italy. But Francis I. invited one of anato- these, Vidus Vidius, to his royal colmists. lege at Paris; and from that time France had several of respectable name. Such were Charles Etienne, one of the great typographical family, Sylvius, and Gonthier. A French writer about 1540, Levasseur, appears to have known, at least, the circulation of the blood through the lungs, as well as the valves of the arteries and veins, and their direction, and its purpose; treading closely on an anti 17. The practice of trusting to animal dissection, from which it was dif- Imperfeeficult for anatomists to extricate tion of the themselves, led some men of real science. merit into errors. They seem, also, not to have profited sufficiently by the writings of their predecessors. Massa of Venice, one of the greatest of this age, is ignorant of some things known to Berenger. Many proofs occur in Portal, how imperfectly the elder anatomists could yet demonstrate the more delicate parts of the human body. SECTION III. On Natural History. 18. THE progress of natural history, in all its departments, was very slow, Botany. and should, of course, be estimated by the additions made to the valuable materials collected by Aristotle, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny. The few fore this time were too meager and imbotanical treatises that had appeared beperfect to require mention. Otto Brunfels of Strasburg was the first who published, Eicones, in three volumes folio, with 238 in 1530, a superior work, Herbarum vivæ wooden cuts of plants. Euricius Cordus of Marburg, in his Botanilogicon, or Dialogues on Plants, displays, according to the Biographie Universelle, but little knowledge of Greek, and still less observation of nature. Cordus has deserved more praise (though this seems better due to Lorenzo de' Medici) as the first who established a botanical garden. This Botanical was at Marburg, in 1530.§ But the gardens. fortunes of private physicians were hardly and frequently reprinted throughout Euequal to the cost of a useful collection. rope. Notwithstanding a bad arrangeThe University of Pisa led the way by ment, and the author's proneness to creestablishing a public garden in 1545, ac-dulity, it was of great service at a time cording to the date which Tiraboschi has when no good work on that subject was determined. That of Padua had founded in existence in Italy; and its reputation a professorship of botany in 1533.* seems to have been not only general, but of long duration.* 19. Ruel, a physician of Soissons, an excellent Greek scholar, had become Ruel. known by a translation of Dioscorides in 1516, upon which Huet has bestowed high praise. His more celebrated treatise de natura stirpium appeared at Paris in 1536, and is one of the handsomest offspring of that press. It is a compilation from the Greek and Latin authors on botany, made with taste and judgment. His knowledge, however, derived from experience, was not considerable, though he has sometimes given the French names of species described by the Greeks, so far | as his limited means of observation and the difference of climate enabled him. Many later writers have borrowed from Ruel their general definitions and descriptions of plants, which he himself took from Theophrastus.† 20. Ruel, however, seems to have been left far behind by Leonard Fuchs, Fuchs. professor of medicine in more than one German university, who has secured a verdant immortality in the well-known Fuchsia. Besides many works on his art, esteemed in their time, he published at Basle, in 1542, his Commentaries on the History of Plants, containing above five hundred figures, a botanical treatise frequently reprinted, and translated into most European languages. "Considered as a naturalist, and especially as a botanist, Fuchs holds a distinguished place, and he has thrown a strong light on that science. His chief object is to describe exactly the plants used in medicine; and his prints, though mere outlines, are generally faithful. He shows that the plants and vegetable products mentioned by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Hippocrates, and Galen had hitherto been ill known."† 21. Matthioli, an Italian physician, in a Matthioli, peaceful retreat near Trent, ac complished a laborious repertory of medical botany in his Commentaries on Dioscorides, published originally, 1544, in Italian, but translated by himself into Latin, 22. It was not singular that much should have been published, imperfect as Low state it might be, on the natural his- of zoology, tory of plants, while that of animal nature, as a matter of science, lay almost neglected. The importance of vegetable products in medicine was far more extensive and various; while the ancient treatises, which formed substantially the chief knowledge of nature possessed in the sixteenth century, are more copious and minute on the botanical than the animated kingdom. Hence we find an absolute dearth of books relating to zoology. P. Jovius de piscibus Romanis is rather the work of a philologer and a lover of good cheer than a naturalist, and treats only of the fish eaten at the Roman tables.† Gillius de vi et natura animalium is little else than a compilation from Elian and other ancient authors, though Niceron says that the author has interspersed some observations of his own.‡ No work of the least importance, even for that time, can perhaps be traced in Europe on any part of zoology, before the Avium præcipuarum historia of our countryman Turner, published at Cologne in 1548, though this is confined to species described by the ancients. Gesner, in his Pandects, which bear date in the same year, several times refers to it with commendation. 23. Agricola, a native of Saxony, acquired a perfect knowledge of the Agricola. processes of metallurgy from the miners of Chemnitz, and perceived the immense resources that might be drawn from the abysses of the earth. "He is the first mineralogist," says Cuvier, "who appeared after the revival of science in Europe. He was to mineralogy what Gesner was to zoology; the chymical part of metallurgy, and especially what relates to assaying, is treated with great ni, Tiraboschi, ix., 2. Andrès, xiii., 85. Corniavi., 5. Andrès, xiii., 143. Roscoe's Leo X., ubi supra. Bembo was also celebrated. Theophrastus and Vol. xxiii. Biogr. Univ. Andrès, xiii., 144. Dioscorides were published in Latin before 1500. Pandect. Univers, lib. 14. Gesner may be said But it was not till about the middle of the sixteenth to make great use of Turner; a high compliment century that botany, through the commentaries of from so illustrious a naturalist. He quotes also a Matthioli on Dioscorides, began to assume a dis-book on quadrupeds, lately printed in German by tinct form, and to be studied as a separate branch. * ix., 10. Biogr. Univ. (by M. du Petit Thouars). Michael Herr. Turner, whom we shall find again as a naturalist, became afterward Dean of Wells, and was one of theearly Puritans.-See Chalmers's Dictionary. |