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interest, both on account of its having given an impulse to the study of anthropotomy, and because of its being one of the first books published with anatomical woodcuts, bears the following imposing title, which we give at length :-" Anthropologium de hominis dignitate natura et proprietatibus, de elementis, partibus et membris corporis, de juramentis, nocumentis, accidentibus, vitiis, remediis, et physionomia ipsorum, de excrementis et exeuntibus, de spiritu humano ejusque natura, partibus et operibus, de anima et ipsiis appendiciis. Per Magnum Hundt Parthenopolitanum. Ingenuarum artium Magistrum in gymnasio Liptzensi. Ad laudem Dei et communem studiosorum hominem utilitatem quam accuratissime ex philosophorum congestum. Impr. Liptzick per Baccal. Wolf. Monacensem 1501. 4to.' There is no doubt that Hundt was one of the first authors of modern Europe who used the word anthropology; and this will be sufficient to cause him to be gratefully remembered by the future historian of anthropological science.

George Reusch, also called Gregorio Reisch, or Gregorius Rischius Carthusianus, was born about 1470-80, at Balingen, in Würtemberg. He subsequently became prior of the Carthusian convent at Freyburg, in Bresgau, and enjoyed great authority under Emperor Maximilian I, whose father confessor he was, and at whose death he was present.

The celebrated Dr. Johann Eck, the most violent opponent of the Reformation, went to Freyburg to study mathematics under Reisch.

It is singular that Reisch is scarcely mentioned in any of the biographical dictionaries, nor in encyclopædias; yet he must have been one of the most learned men of his time. His chief work, Margarita Philosophica, although consisting of only one volume, is a cyclopædia in miniature; and was, in fact, published later under the title of Encyclopædia, and one of the first books published under that name. This rare work is, as far as we know, the third anatomical book illustrated by woodcuts. Ketham's Mundinus, 1478, Hundt's Anthopologium, 1501, Margarita, 1503. The edition now before us is of 1508. We give the head, which is almost mapped as a phrenological bust of the

present day. The engraving has been published by several authors, but has always been attributed to Baptista Porta, whose work was not published till 1583. We have not seen it mentioned in Porta that the illustration, which is, in fact, a fac-simile, was taken from the work of Reisch. Ludovico Dolci published this figure in his Dialogues, in 1562, but the engraving is somewhat reduced, and the tongue is out. There is little or nothing to be learnt from these works besides what we learn from the engravings themselves. Margarita says the number of internal senses are five: common sense, imagination, estimation,

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phantasia, or imagination and memory. The common sense is in the first portion of the anterior ventricle, as is also the power of imagination. In the middle ventricle is the estimativa, and in the posterior, the memorativa. The word vermis (worm) will probably puzzle many modern anatomists, if not scholars. As used by Mundinus, it means the worm-like passage between the anterior and the middle ventricle, so that the spirits may pass from one ventricle to the rest. In Dolci's figure the following explanation is given. Hortensius (in the usual dialogue form) says, as the teacher, “You see in this figure where is the common-sense, where is the imagination, where the estimative power, where the power of memory, and also where is smell and taste." Fabricius (the pupil) answers, "I see all this remarkably well, and everything is put in its proper place."

J. Baptista Porta was born at Naples about 1550. He was, to judge from his numerous works, a most erudite physiognomist, deeply read in the works of his predecessors. His chief book, De Humana Physiognomia, published in 1586, has been translated into many different modern languages. He closely follows Aristotle and Avicenna, and considers that the human face should be compared with that of animals. No part of the human body is passed over. The woodcut representing the human head, with the distribution of the mental faculties, is, as already stated, without acknowledgment, taken from the Margarita Philosophica of Reusch.

Andreas Vesalius was one of the first who tried to shake off the yoke of Galen. He was a pupil of the celebrated Sylvius, who afterwards became his violent opponent, and described him as a mad reformer, because he dissented from Galen. His greatest work (immortale opus, Haller), is his De Humani corporis fabrica libri VII. Basil, 1542." Burggraeve (Etudes sur Vesale) says, "Vesalius has not enriched anatomy, he has created it." This is doubtless an exaggeration; but there is no doubt that the anatomical illustrations of Vesalius' works, drawn by great artists,-probably by Johann von Kalcker, a pupil of Titian, if not by Titian himself some say also by Michael Angelo-have been copied in almost all the anatomical works of the sixteenth century.

Of his physiology of the brain, we may merely mention that Vesalius well distinguished the grey or cortical substance from the medullary substance; he described the ventricles more correctly, denied that smell had its seat in the anterior cornu of the ventricle. He endeavoured to establish that the use of the ventricles was chiefly to act as reservoirs for the animal spirits. He described the choroid plexus, the septum lucidum, and the fornix.

Although the knowledge of the structure of the brain, and the dis

tribution of the nerves greatly advanced, the old theory of Galen still prevailed, that the animal spirits were secreted in the ventricles, and that the blood, intermixed with vital spirits, was, through the gyri of the brain, poured into these ventricles for the production of the animal spirits.

Chanet says: "The first internal faculty to which the species are carried by the spirits is called sens commun. This sensus communis does not mean what is vulgarly called common sense, natural sense, natural logic, as opposed to artificial logic as taught in the schools. Thus, we say a man is a sensible man, which is synonymous with a clear-sighted, a reasonable, or rational man. The school-men, following Aristotle, say that sensus communis is the centre, where all the reports of the external senses are carried to."

Speaking of imagination, he says:

"The images being brought by the spirits (nerves) to the interior ventricle of the brain, excite the faculty which here resides. It is called imagination because it receives and discerns the images of all external senses. It is for her that memory preserves the images, to give them back to her for making new representations. The Greeks called it phantasia. Aristotle derives this term from a word signifying light light standing in the highest relation with the sensitive soul, which resides in the brain. Imagination, some say, is the action of the imaginative faculty. This faculty is, properly, what people call esprit, or, as the Romans called it, ingenium. As the mind can have no new sensation but by the intermediation of the senses, which originally is due to the motion of certain fibres, its reproduction by the imagination depends still on the motion of the same fibres.

"All accidents which affect the body may weaken and destroy the imagination and the memory. Both have, therefore, their seat in the body.

"The sensory fibres are so constructed, that a more or less continuous action upon them by objects produce more or less durable determinations, which constitute the physic of memory.

"The condition of the fibres upon which an object has acted is no longer the same as it was before; but the fibres have been modified. It is impossible to say in what this modification consists. The tenacity of memory depends on the special disposition of the elements to retain the determinations imprinted upon them. An intelligence fully acquainted with the whole mechanism of the brain could read it like a book. The prodigious number of minute organs appropriated to sensations and thoughts would be, for such an intelligence, what, for us, are printed characters. We turn over the leaves of books; we study them. The aforesaid intelligence would merely contemplate the brains.

"I say nothing of traces and delineations in the brain which are so

* Traité de l'esprit de l'homme, par le Sieur Chanet, Paris, 1649.

gratuitously assumed when the question is of memory. I confess I can form no idea of this, and consider it, therefore, more philosophical to admit that the same organs which, acted upon by objects, yield so diversified perceptions, are so constructed that their constituent parts receive from the action of objects such modifications, whence results a tendency to move in a certain direction from habit."

Imagination, he contends, resides in the fore-part of the brain. He gives a variety of reasons, the chief being that, after a strong effort of the imagination, we feel a lassitude, and considerable heat in the forehead. He, however, cautions his readers not to think that the imagination resides in an indivisible point of the brain, or is attached to a single spot, but its locality is more extended. "Anatomy," he observes, "shows that the brain is composed of a number of small organs, we see dispersed in different parts of the brain, though we may not know the use of these different parts." The date of this, it is well to remember, is 1649, or a century and a-half before the time of Gall. Our author then proceeds to the organ of memory. He is afraid that he may be accused of using improper terms in attributing an organ to memory, which has no action, and is, properly speaking, no faculty. Be that as it may, it has a passive instrument, a particular portion of the brain where the species are arrested and fixed.

"I hold," he says, "with the common opinion that this part is the cerebellum. The proofs are, certainly, not so very strong in favour of this theory as I should wish. Still, they seem probable and must be accepted. I find them contradicted only by one surgeon, who boasts of having removed the cerebellum without any disorder of the intellect intervening. But this surgeon seems to belong to that class of vain-glorious operators who brag of having removed large organs when they have only removed a few atoms. If he had simply said that memory had not suffered, I might have believed him ;. but to say that no faculty whatever was damaged, is to say that nature made an organ of no use. I believe, on the other hand, an author worthy of belief, who states that he found the cerebellum absent in a man who, during life, had little or no memory. What a marvellous composition must have, then, that organ which is the direct instrument of our mental operations! What would be our delight if the mechanism of this masterpiece of the Omnipotent were displayed before our eyes! We should behold in this organ a little world; and if it belonged to a Leibnitz, this little world would be the abstract of a universe."*

*The celebrated Hooke, on the supposition that an idea may be formed in twenty tierces of time, found that a man would, in one hundred years, collect 9,467,280,000 ideas, or vestiges; and if we were to reduce this sum to one-third on account of sleep, there would still remain 3,155,760,000 ideas; and supposing that there are two pounds of medulla in the brain, one grain of this medulla would have 205,452 vestiges (l'hys., Haller, t. v, lib. xvii, § vi). Much more wonderful would it appear when the vestiges, of which Hooke speaks, only reside in a very minute portion of the brain, and not in a considerable mass of this viscus. We might as easily apply it to one grain of this mass. Our imagination cannot seize such objects.