Joannes Guinterus, it is interesting to know, bears honourable testimony to the merits of his two assistants. In the preface to his ‘Anatomical Institutions’ he informs us that ‘he had been most effectually aided in the preparation of the work, first by Andrea Vesalius, a young man, by Hercules! singularly proficient in anatomy; and after him by Michael Villanovanus, distinguished by his literary acquirements of every kind, and scarcely second to any in his knowledge of Galenical doctrine. Under the supervision and with the aid of these two,’ he continues, ‘I have myself examined in the Subject and have shown to the students the whole of the muscles, veins, arteries, and nerves, both of the extremities and internal parts of the body.’[43] From this we learn whence Servetus had the anatomical knowledge that enabled him as inductive reasoner--true forerunner here of our own immortal Harvey--to proclaim the pulmonary circulation. The practice of dissecting the human subject had therefore, by this time, extended to France--the bodies of one or more malefactors being now publicly anatomised in the course of each winter session.[44] Had we no other evidence of the genius with which Michael Servetus was endowed, beyond the use he made of what he saw in these anatomical demonstrations, we should still feel entitled to speak of him as the most far-sighted physiologist of his age; for he alone of all his contemporaries, though fettered by the prevalent metaphysical theories of life, the soul and the spirits, from which we ourselves have not yet escaped, not only divined, but positively proclaimed the passage of the blood, by way of the lungs, from the right to the left side of the heart, and thence--but stopping short of the whole truth, first proclaimed by Harvey--from the left ventricle of the heart to the body at large. But the book in which his important Induction is contained, though printed in his lifetime, _was never published_. Seen by none but a few theologians, who took no note of its physiological contents, it remained unknown to the world for nearly a century and a half, after its author had fallen a victim to the hate of Calvin and the intolerance of his age.