aquatic animals with fish, and the bat among birds.
Occasionally he describes a purely mythical animal like "the
monkey-fox." It is difficult to see what criterion of truth would have
been adequate for the scholar at that time. A monkey-fox is no more
improbable than a rhinoceros, and Gesner found it necessary to assure
his readers that the rhinoceros really existed in nature and was not a
creation of fancy.

[Sidenote: Leonardo]

As the master of modern anatomy and of several other branches of
science, stands Leonardo da Vinci. It is difficult to appraise his
work accurately because it is not yet fully known, and still more
because of its extraordinary form. Ho left thousands of pages of notes
on everything and hardly one complete treatise on anything. He began a
hundred studies and finished none of them. He had a queer twist to his
mind that made him, with all his power, seek byways. The monstrous,
the uncouth, fascinated him; he saw a Medusa in a spider and the
universe in a drop of water. He wrote his notes in mirror-writing,
from right to left; he illustrated them with a thousand fragments of
exquisite drawing, all unfinished and tantalizing alike to the artist
and to the scientist. His mind roamed to flying machines and
submarines, but he never made one; the reason given by him in the
latter case being his fear that it would be put to piratical use. He
had something in him of Faust; in some respects he reminds us of
William James, who also started as a {613} painter and ended as an
omniverous student of outre things and as a psychologist.

[Sidenote: Anatomy]

If, therefore, the anatomical drawings made by Leonardo from about
twenty bodies that he dissected, are marvellous specimens of art, he
left it to others to make a really systematic study of the human body.
His contemporary, Berengar of Carpi, professor at Bologna, first did
this with marked success, classifying the various tissues as fat,
membrane, flesh, nerve, fibre and so forth. So far from true is it
that it was difficult to get corpses to work upon that he had at least
a hundred. Indeed, according to Fallopius, another famous scientist,
the Duke of Tuscany would occasionally send live criminals to be
vivisected, thus making their punishment redound to the benefit of
science. The Inquisitors made the path of science hard by burning
books on anatomy as materialistic and indecent.

[Sidenote: Servetus]

Two or three investigators ant