"He tried to do what others had done before him--he tried to believe Galen rather than his own eyes, but his eyes were too strong for him; and in the end he cast Galen and his writings to the winds, and taught only what he himself had seen and what he could make his students see, too. Thus he brought into anatomy the new spirit of the time, and the men of the time, the young men of the time, answered the new voice. Students flocked to his lectures; his hearers amounted, it is said, to some five hundred, and an enlightened senate recognized his worth by repeatedly raising his emoluments. [Illustration: Fig. 4.--Vesalius, 1514-1564.] "Five years he thus spent in untiring labors at Padua. Five years he wrought, not weaving a web of fancied thought, but patiently disentangling the pattern of the texture of the human body, trusting to the words of no master, admitting nothing but that which he himself had seen; and at the end of the five years, in 1542, while he was as yet not twenty-eight years of age, he was able to write the dedication to Charles V of a folio work entitled the 'Structure of the Human Body,' adorned with many plates and woodcuts which appeared at Basel in the following year, 1543." His Physiognomy.--This classic with the Latin title, _De Humani Corporis Fabrica_, requires some special notice; but first let us have a portrait of Vesalius, the master. Fig. 4 shows a reproduction of the portrait with which his work is provided. He is represented in academic costume, probably that which he wore at lectures, in the act of demonstrating the muscles of the arm. The picture is reduced, and in the reduction loses something of the force of the original. We see a strong, independent, self-willed countenance; what his features lack in refinement they make up in force; not an artistic or poetic face, but the face of the man of action with scholarly training. His Great Book.--The book of Vesalius laid the foundation of modern biological science. It is more than a landmark in the progress of science--it created an epoch. It is not only interesting historically, but on account of the highly artistic plates with which it is illustrated it is interesting to examine by one not an anatomist. For executing the plates Vesalius secured the service of a fellow-countryman, John Stephen de Calcar, who was one of the most gifted pupils of Titian. The drawings are of such high artistic quality that for a long time they were ascribed to Titian. The artist has attempted to soften the necessarily prosaic nature of anatomical illustrations by introducing an artistic background of landscape of varied features, with bridges, roads, streams, buildings, etc. The employment of a background even in portrait-painting was not uncommon in the same century, as in Leonardo da Vinci's well-known Mona Lisa, with its suggestive perspective of water, rocks, etc. [Illustration: Fig. 5.--Anatomical Sketch from Vesalius's _Fabrica_.