Medicine, which failed to advance with the astronomical and physical sciences, began to improve. The Moors had established great medical schools in Spain, but their teachings were based upon the principles enunciated by Hippocrates and the Greek schools. Modern medicine was started upon a firm basis by John Harvey (1578-1657). Hippocrates taught that the blood was one of the principal parts of the body--one of the four great "humors." Its movements, however, had never been investigated until Harvey began to study the functions of the arterial system by the dissection of animals. The arteries had been considered as merely air tubes. This was due to the fact that they were studied only in post-mortem examinations when they were empty. The anatomists of the sixteenth century failed to grasp their importance. Harvey, who was a penetrating observer, had studied in several continental universities as well as in England, and having an original mind he determined to test the medical theories which he had been taught. His discoveries of the functions of the heart, the arteries, and the veins were epochal. He did his work so well and made such simple, yet telling, demonstrations that he had less difficulty than his predecessors in getting his teachings accepted. He was soon recognized as the peer of Hippocrates and Galen. Harvey died without actually seeing the blood coursing from the arteries into the veins, but four years after his death Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) exhibited microscopically the passage of blood corpuscles through the minute vessels in the lung of a turtle, on their way from the heart through the arteries into the veins and returning to the heart. The blood circulation was demonstrated at a subsequent date by applying a microscope to the web of a frog's foot. With low-powered lenses a good view is obtainable in this manner. Many other important discoveries were made by Harvey, particularly in embryology. He demonstrated that the embryo chicken is formed by gradual development and processes of differentiation and not, as had previously been believed, from a minute perfect chicken. Microbes were discovered in 1683 by Antonius von Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), when he was examining some scrapings from his teeth. He saw for the first time the long and short rods of bacilli and bacteria, the spirillum and the micrococci. He tried means for destroying them and met with a fair degree of success with a gargle composed of a mixture of vinegar and hot coffee. This experiment was one of the early anticipations of antiseptic surgery, which was invented by Lister in the nineteenth century.