But among the great arterial vessels that sent forth arterial blood thus charged with vital spirits were certain vessels which ascended to the brain. Before reaching that organ they divided up into minute channels, the _rete mirabile_ (πλεγμα μεγιστον θαυμα {plegma megiston thauma}), and passing into the brain became converted by the action of that organ into a yet higher type of spirits, the _animal spirits_ (πνευμα ψυχικον {pneuma psychikon}, _spiritus animalis_), an ethereal substance distributed to the various parts of the body by the structures known to-day as nerves, but believed then to be hollow channels. The three fundamental faculties (δυναμεις {dynameis}), the _natural_, the _vital_, and the _animal_, which brought into action the corresponding functions of the body, thus originated as an expression of the primal force or pneuma. This physiology, we may emphasize, is not derived from an investigation of human anatomy. In the human brain there is no _rete mirabile_, though such an organ is found in the calf. In the human liver there is no _hepatic vein_, though such an organ is found in the dog. Dogs, calves, pigs, bears, and, above all, Barbary apes were freely dissected by Galen and were the creatures from which he derived his physiological ideas. Many of Galen's anatomical and physiological errors are due to his attributing to one creature the structures found in another, a fact that only very gradually dawned on the Renaissance anatomists. The whole knowledge possessed by the world in the department of physiology from the third to the seventeenth century, nearly all the biological conceptions till the thirteenth, and most of the anatomy and much of the botany until the sixteenth century, all the ideas of the physical structure of living things throughout the Middle Ages, were contained in a small number of these works of Galen. The biological works of Aristotle and Theophrastus lingered precariously in a few rare manuscripts in the monasteries of the East; the total output of hundreds of years of Alexandrian and Pergamenian activities was utterly destroyed; the Ionian biological works, of which a sample has by a miracle survived, were forgotten; but these vast, windy, ill-arranged treatises of Galen lingered on. Translated into Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew, they saturated the intellectual world of the Middle Ages. Commented on by later Greek writers, who were themselves in turn translated into the same list of languages, they were yet again served up under the names of such Greek writers as Oribasius, Paul of Aegina, or Alexander of Tralles.