[64] In Casaubon’s diary we get a glimpse of Oxford in 1613. The University was wealthy enough; it had escaped the Paris devastation, but had scarcely deserved its good fortune. There was much active teaching of a routine kind, many formalities, much serving of tables; but of living interest in science, learning, or high culture there was not a trace. Of classical learning, in Casaubon’s sense, there was naught. Ecclesiastical controversies absorbed or overwhelmed all other subjects; and the University was regarded by the Government as an instrument of party. The professors were all clerks, and ardent only as pamphleteers. Thus, says Pattison, “the University took its full share of national passion, prejudice and religious sentiment, but was wholly destitute of any power to vivify, to correct, to instruct, or to enlighten.” Pattison’s Casaubon, p. 417. [65] Both in Bologna and Padua of course there was a faculty of Medicine; but its tradition in Bologna was traditional and galenical, in Padua independent and progressive. Montpellier had suffered in the desolation of Languedoc. [66] See page 82. [67] Contra Medicum quendam Invectivarum Libri Quatuor. (Op. T. II. pp. 1086, 801. Ed. Basel, 1555, quoted Renan, Aver. p. 331.) [68] The Royal College of Physicians of London had its birth in the schools of Italy; and perhaps in revolt from Averroism the elegant humanity of Linacre has too often prevailed in this College rather than Harvey’s strenuous control of tradition and rhetoric by more positive conceptions, and of all conceptions by direct experimental verification. [69] Niccolò Leonico (I give his Latin name in the text as Ueberweg gives it) seems to have been a spirited and effective philosophical lecturer of Hellenist and critical qualities, and of much charm both of style and character. He is not to be confounded with his elder contemporary, Nicolaus Leonicenus, of Vicenza and Ferrara, professor of medicine and an elegant latiner, who translated the aphorisms of Hippocrates; and whose friend Linacre, in translating parts of Galen, did a like service to medicine and letters in England. [70] Not only of the circulation of the blood. In his treatise _De generatione_ Harvey disposed of the belief in spontaneous generation (so far as regards visible creatures, its abolition we owe to Pasteur), yet Bacon (N. O. II. 41) accepts it, perhaps as fully as did Sir Thomas Browne. The _De generatione_ however was not actually published till 1651, some 30 years after the _Novum Organon_. [71] Galileo and Kepler had proved the validity of terrestrial physics and mathematics in astronomy. Aristotle of course was the first to apply physics to astronomy, but wrong physics. [72] With which Malpighi was in close association.