The century dating from the birth of Galileo to the death of Harvey was perhaps the most brilliant in the history of modern knowledge. The discovery of Greek texts had destroyed the conventional Aristotle, the conventional Hippocrates and Galen; since the latter part of the sixteenth century Greek had been taught in the High Schools, philosophy was born again, and men found themselves no longer the slaves but the kin of the great ancients. Telesius, Bruno, Campanella vindicated natural science and liberty of thought. Galileo taught in Padua for twenty years, including the time when Harvey graduated there; Torricelli was a pupil of the great Florentine; in 1582, on the theory of Copernicus, Gregory reformed the Calendar, and thus laid the axe to the root of astrology; by Newton terrestrial physics were established in the celestial spheres[71]. Malpighi, who was to fulfil Harvey’s discovery and foresight, was born in N.-E. Italy in the very year (1628) in which the _De motu cordis_ was published. In 1626 Boyle was creating chemistry. Anatomy, which had slept since its days in Alexandria, was fully awake. The Society of the Lincei was virtually founded in 1603; the Royal Society[72] in 1645; the Academy of France in 1656. Clinical teaching, initiated in Salerno and advanced by the _Consilia_ _medica_[73], was formally established in Padua[74], to be pursued in Heidelberg, Leyden, and Vienna. Thus was the study “De rerum natura juxta propria principia” unfolded, and the “Civitas Dei” gave place to the “Regnum Hominis.” The “Regnum Hominis”! Yet when I look, from a respectful distance, upon the folios of the schoolmen, monuments, I am told, as empty as the Pyramids of Egypt, my mind turns back to the fiery and turbulent tribes which in the “deep but dazzling darkness” of the Middle Ages raged upon a barren land before the nations began; and I wonder if the ideas which awed them, swayed them, and welded them into stable societies were fancies as wild and sterile; and if the men who wrought them were mere traffickers in words. And then I wonder if we are glad that the riddle of the origin and issues of being, which tormented their eager hearts, is not solved, but proved insoluble: if we are glad that “sub specie hominis” the earth, no longer the nursery of eternal souls, is but a meteor in the sky; men and women but the gleam upon it; the sons of Heaven but companies of whirling stones, and the Father of Heaven an inaccessible idea.