After this, evidence of dissection accumulates rapidly. During the second decade of the century Mondino, the first writer on anatomy, was working at Bologna. We have the records of his having made some dissections in connection with his university teaching there, and eventually he published a text-book on dissection which became the guide for dissectors for the next two centuries. Within five years after this we have a story of students being haled to court for body-snatching for anatomical purposes, and about this time there was, according to Rashdall in his History of the Universities, a statute of the University of Bologna which required the teacher in anatomy to dissect a body, if the students brought it to him. More than ten years earlier than this, that is, {38} within ten years after the supposed Papal prohibition, there are records of dissections having been made at Venice in public, for the benefit of the doctors of the city, at the expense of the municipal treasury. During the first half of this century money was allowed at Bologna for wine, to be given to those who attended the public dissections, and if we recall the state in which the bodies must have been at a time when the use of preservatives was unknown, we can well understand the need for it. All this shows, as I have said, that the date of Boniface's bull (1300), far from representing the eclipse of anatomy, actually fixes the date of the dawn of modern practical anatomical study. The most interesting question in this whole discussion is as to how much dissection Mondino actually did during the second decade of the fourteenth century. His book became the manual of dissection that was in practically every dissector's hands for several centuries after. Probably no book of its kind has ever been more used, and none maintained its place as the standard work in this department for so long. No less than 25 printed editions of it appeared altogether. It would seem to be utterly improbable that the author of a text-book of this kind could have made only a few dissections. There are a number of historians who have claimed, nevertheless, that at most he did not dissect more than three or four bodies. This is all that we have absolute evidence for, that is to say, only these dissections are recorded. It is easy to understand, however, that a professor of anatomy might make even hundreds of dissections, and yet have something to say only about a very few which happened to present some special peculiarities. The absence of further records may readily be accounted for also in {39} other ways. The art of printing was not yet invented; paper had only just been discovered and was extremely expensive, and many factors conspired to destroy any records that may have been made.