own, in some ways, more accurate studies—studies in which, as my colleague Professor Brooks of the Johns Hopkins University has pointed out, he has forestalled Wolf and von Baer.
The work of Fabricius which really concerns us here is the de Venarum Ostiolis. Others before him had seen and described the valves of the veins, Carolus one of the great Stephani, Sylvius and Paul Sarpi. But an abler hand in this work has dealt with the subject, and has left us a monograph which for completeness and for accuracy and beauty of illustration has scarcely its equal in anatomical literature. Compare Plate VII, for ex- ample, with the illustrations of the same structures in the Bidloo or the Cowper Anatomy, published nearly one hundred years later; and we can appreciate the advantages which Harvey must have enjoyed in working with such a master. Indeed, it is not too far-fetched to imagine him, scalpel in hand, making some of the very dissections from which these wonderful drawings were taken. But here comes in the mystery. How Fabricius, a man who did such work—how a teacher of such wide learning and such remarkable powers of observation, could have been so blinded as to overlook the truth which was tumbling out, so to speak, at his feet, is to us incomprehensible. But his eyes were sealed, and to him, as to his greater predecessors in the chair, clear vision was denied. The dead hand of the great Pergamite lay heavy on all thought, and Descartes had not yet changed the beginning of philosophy from wonder to doubt. Not without a feeling of pity do we read of the hopeless struggle of these great men to escape from slavish submission to authority. But it is not for us in these light days to gauge the depth of the sacred veneration with which they regarded the Fathers. Their
