by Will Durant
The most impressive adventure in this second generation of transoceanic exploration was the circling of the globe. Fernāo de Magalhāes was a Portuguese who shared actively in many Portuguese voyages and forays, but, falling into disfavor with his government, he passed into the service of Spain. In 1518 he persuaded Charles I (V) to finance an expedition that would seek a southwest passage to Asia. The young King was not yet rich, and the five ships allotted to Magellan were so weatherbeaten that one captain pronounced them unseaworthy. The largest was of 120 tons burden, the smallest, of seventy-five. Experienced sailors were loath to enlist; the crews had to be made up in large part of water-front riffraff. On September 20, 1519, the fleet sailed out of the Guadalquivir at San Lucar. It had the advantage of sailing from summer in the North Atlantic into summer in the South Atlantic; but in March 1520, winter came, and the vessels were anchored while the crews spent five weary months in Patagonia. The giant natives, averaging over six feet in height, gave the comparatively short Spaniards a condescending friendliness; nevertheless the hardships were so endless that three of the five crews mutinied, and Magellan had to wage war against his own men to compel their continuance in the enterprise. One ship stole away and returned to Spain; another was shattered on a reef. In August 1520, the voyage was resumed, and every bay was eagerly looked into as possibly the mouth of a transcontinental waterway. Or November 28 the search sueceeded; the reduced fleet entered the Straits that bear Magellan’s name. Thirty-eight days were spent in the 320-mile passage from sea to sea.
Then began a dreary crossing of the seemingly endless Pacific. In ninety-eight days only two small islands were seen. Provisions ran dangerously low, and scurvy plagued the crews. On March 6, 1521, they touched at Guam, but the natives were so hostile that Magellan sailed on. On April 6 they reached the Philippines; on the seventh they landed on the island of Cebu. There Magellan, to assure supplies, agreed to support the local ruler against neighboring enemies. He took part in an expedition against the island of Mactan, and was killed in battle there on April 27, 1521. He did not circumnavigate the globe, but he was the first to realize Columbus’ dream of reaching Asia by sailing west.52
The crews were now so reduced by death that they could man only two ships. One of these turned back across the Pacific, probably seeking American gold. Only the Victoria remained. Juan Sebastián del Cano took command, and guided the little vessel, of eighty-five tons burden, through the Spice Islands, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the west coast of Africa. Hungry for supplies, the crew anchored the ship off one of the Cape Verde Islands, but they were attacked by the Portuguese, and half of them were jailed. The remaining twenty-two managed to get away; and on September 8, 1522, the Victoria sailed up to Seville, with only eighteen men (the rest were Malays) of the 280 who had set out from Spain almost three years before. The ship’s log recorded the date as September 7; Cardinal Gasparo Contarini explained the discrepancy as due to the westward direction of the voyage. The enterprise was one of the bravest in history, and one of the most fruitful for geography.
It remained for the geographers to catch up with the explorers. Giambattista Ramusio, the Italian Hakluyt, made the task easier by collecting, through thirty years, the accounts brought home by voyagers and other travelers; he translated and edited them, and they were published in three volumes (1550-59), thirteen years after his death. The progress made by the geographers in a decade becomes visible in comparing the 1520 globe preserved in the Germanisches National Museum at Nuremberg—which shows the West Indies but no American continent, and skips over a narrow ocean to Asia—with the three maps drawn up (1527-29) by Diogo Ribeiro, which show the coasts of Europe, Africa, and southern Asia with great accuracy, the east coast of the Americas from Newfoundland to the Straits of Magellan, and the west coast from Peru to Mexico. Probably copied from Ribeiro is the beautiful “Ramusio Map” (Venice, 1534) of the Americas in the New York Public Library. In the same alma mater is an early and faulty map by Gerhadus Mercator (1538), in which North and South America were first so named. (“Mercator’s Projection” belongs to 1569.) Peter Apian (1524) furthered the science by attempting to reduce geographical distances to precise measurements.
The effects of these explorations were felt in every phase of European life. The voyages of 1420-1560 nearly quadrupled the known surface of the globe. New fauna and flora, gems and minerals, foods and drugs, enlarged the botany, zoology, geology, menu, and pharmacopoeia of Europe. People wondered how representatives of all the new species had found room in Noah’s ark. Literature was transformed: the old tales of chivalry gave way to stories of travel or adventure in distant lands; the search for gold replaced the quest of the Holy Grail in unconscious symbolism of the modern mood. The greatest commercial revolution in history (before the maturing of the airplane) opened the Atlantic and other oceans to European trade, and left the Mediterranean in a commercial—soon, therefore, in a cultural—backwater; the Renaissance moved from Italy to the Atlantic states. Europe, possessing better ships and guns, a hardier, more acquisitive and adventurous population, conquered—sometimes colonized—one after another of the newly discovered lands. Native populations were put to unwontedly steady and arduous work producing goods for Europe; slavery became an established institution. The almost-smallest continent became the richest; that Europeanization of the globe began which has been so sharply reversed in our time. The mind of Western man was powerfully stimulated by the distance, immensity, and variety of the new lands. Part of Montaigne’s skepticism would root in the fascination of exotic ways and faiths. Customs and morals took on a geographical relativity that sapped old dogmas and certainties. Christianity itself had to be viewed in a new perspective as the religion of a minor continent amid á world of rival creeds. As humanism had discovered a world before Christ, and Copernicus had exposed the astronomic insignificance of the earth, so exploration and the commerce that followed it revealed vast realms beyond and ignoring Christianity. The authority of Aristotle and the other Greeks was damaged when it appeared how little of the planet they had known. The Renaissance idolatry of the Greeks declined, and man, swelling with Renaissance pride at his new discoveries, prepared to forget his lessened astronomic size in the expansion of his knowledge and his trade. Modern science and philosophy rose, and undertook the epochal task of reconceiving the world.
IV. THE RESURRECTION OF BIOLOGY
The biological sciences, which had made hardly any progress since the Greeks, now came back to life. Botany struggled to free itself from pharmacy and stand on its own feet; it succeeded, but inevitably its masters were still medical men. Otto Brunfels, city physician at Bern, began the movement with his Herbarum vivae icones (1530-3 6)—“living pictures of plants”; its text was largely filched from Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and other predecessors, but it also described the native plants of Germany, and its 135 woodcuts were models of fidelity. Euricius Cordus, city physician to Bremen, set up the first botanical garden (1530) north of the Alps, attempted an independent summary of the nascent science in his Botanilogicon (1534), and hen returned to his medical medium in his Liber de urinis. His son Valerius Cordus wandered recklessly in the study of plants, met his death in the search at the age of twenty-nine (1544), but left for posthumous publication his Historia plantarum, which vividly and accurately described 500 new species. Leonard Fuchs, professor of medicine at Tubingen, studied botany at first for pharmaceutics, then for its own sake and delight. His Historia stirpium (1542) was typical of scientific devotion; its 343 chapters analyzed 343 genera, and illustrated them with 515 woodcuts, each occupying a full folio page. He prepared a still more comprehensive work with 1,500 plates, but no printer would undertake the expense of its publication. The genus Fuchsia is his living memorial.
Perhaps the most important single idea contributed to biology in this period was Pierre Belon’s demonstration, in his Histoire .... des oyseaux (1555), of the astonishing correspondence of the bones in men and birds
. But the greatest figure in the “natural science” of this age was Conrad Gesner, whose work and learning covered so wide a field that Cuvier called him the Pliny, and might have called him the Aristotle, of Germany. Born of a poor family in Zurich (1516), he showed such aptitude and industry that the city joined with private patrons to finance his higher education in Strasbourg, Bourges, Paris, and Basel. He made or collected 1,500 drawings to illustrate his Historia plantarum, but this work proved so expensive to print that it did not emerge from manuscript till 1751; its brilliant classification of plant genera by their reproductive structures reached the light too late to help Linnaeus. He published during his lifetime four volumes (1551-58), and left a fifth, of a gigantic Historia animalium, which listed each animal species under its Latin name, and described its appearance, origin, habitat, habits, illnesses, mental and emotional qualities, medical and domestic uses, and place in literature; the classification was alphabetical instead of scientific, but its encyclopedic accumulation of knowledge invited biology to take form. Insufficiently used up by these labors, Gesner began a twenty-one-volume Bibliotheca universalis, in which he set out to catalogue all known Greek, Latin, and Hebrew writings; he completed twenty volumes, and earned the title of Father of Bibliography. In an aside called Mithridates (1555) he attempted to classify 130 languages of the world. His Descriptio Montis Pilati (1541) was apparently the first published study of mountains as forms of beauty; Switzerland now knew that it was maiestic. All these enterprises were accomplished between 1541 and 1565. In that year Conrad Gesner, the incarnate spirit of study, died.
Meanwhile Juan Vives’s De anima et vita (1538) almost created modern empirical psychology As if to elude the skepticism that Hume would expound two centuries later about the existence of a “mind” additional to mental operations, Vives advised the student not to ask what the mind or soul is, since (he felt) we shall never know this; we must inquire only what the mind does; psychology must cease to be theoretical metaphysics and must become a science based on specific and accumulated observations. Here Vives anticipated by a century Francis Bacon’s emphasis on induction. He studied in detail the association of ideas, the operation and improvement of memory, the process of knowledge, and the role of feeling and emotion. In his book we see psychology, like so many sciences before it, emerging painfully from the womb of their common mother, philosophy.
V. VESALIUS
In 1543 Andreas Vesalius published what Sir William Osier judged the greatest medical work ever written.53 His father, Andreas Wessel, was a prosperous apothecary in Brussels; his grandfather had been physician to Mary of Burgundy and then to her husband Maximilian I; his great-grandfather had been city physician at Brussels; his great-great-grandfather, a physician, had composed a commentary on Avicenna’s Kanun; here was a social heredity outmatching Bach’s. Subjected to it from birth, Vesalius soon developed a passion for dissection. “No animal was safe from him. Dogs and cats, mice, rats, and moles were meticulously dissected by him.”54 But he did not neglect other studies. At twenty-two he lectured in Latin, and readily read Greek. At Paris (1533-36) he studied anatomy under Jacques Dubois, who gave to many muscles and blood vessels the names they bear today. For a long time, like his teachers, he accepted Galen as a Bible; he never lost respect for him, but he respected much more the authority of observation and dissection. With some fellow students he made many trips to the charnel houses where were gathered the bones exhumed from the Cemetery of the Innocents; there they became so familiar with the parts of the human skeleton that, he tells us, “we, even blindfolded, dared at times to wager with our companions, and in the space of half an hour no bone could be offered us... which we could not identify by touch.”55 Frequently, in the classes of Dubois, the bold young anatomist would displace the “barber surgeons” to whom actual dissection was usually delegated by the physician professor, and would himself expertly expose the parts relevant to the lecture.56
When his sovereign Charles V invaded France (1536), Vesalius retired to Louvain. Hampered by a shortage of corpses there, he and his friend Gemma Frisius (later famous as a mathematician) snatched one out of the air. His account reveals his passion:
While out walking, looking for bones in the place where, on the country highways... those who have been executed are customarily placed, I happened upon a dried cadaver... The bones were entirely bare, held together by the ligaments alone.... . With the help of Gemma I climbed the stake and pulled off the femur... The scapulae together with the arms and hands followed.... After I had brought the legs and arms home in secret and successive trips... I allowed myself to be shut out of the city in the evening in order to obtain the thorax, which was firmly held by a chain. I was burning with so great a desire.... The next day I transported the bones home piecemeal through another gate of the city.57
The burgomaster saw the point, and thereafter gave the anatomy classes whatever cadaver could be released; “and he himself,” says Vesalius, “was in regular attendance when I administered an anatomy.”58
A man with such “burning desire” could not keep his temper cool. He fell into a hot dispute with a teacher about methods of venesection, left Louvain (1537), and rode down the Rhine and across the Alps to Italy. He was already so proficient that before the end of that year he received his doctor’s degree at Padua cum ultima diminutione—“with the maximum diminution” of the fee; for the higher a student’s standing the lower his graduation fee. On the very next day (December 6, 1537) the Venetian Senate appointed him professor of surgery and anatomy at the University of Padua. He was twenty-three.
During the following six years he taught at Padua, Bologna, and Pisa, doing hundreds of dissections with his own hands, and issuing some minor works. Under his direction Jan Stefan van Kalkar, a pupil of Titian, drew six plates which were published (1538) as Tabulae anatomicae sex. A year later Vesalius, in a Venesection Letter, supported Pierre Brissot of Paris on methods of bloodletting. In the course of his argument he revealed some results of his dissections of the venous system, and these observations contributed to the discovery of the circulation of the blood. In 1541-42 he joined other scholars in a new edition of the Greek text of Galen. He was astonished by Galenic errors that the simplest human dissection would have disproved—that the lower jaw had two parts, the sternum seven distinct bones, the liver several lobes. Only on the assumption that Galen’s dissections had been of animals, never of men, could these errors be explained and forgiven. Vesalius felt that the time had come to revise the science of human anatomy in terms of the dissection of man. He prepared his masterpiece.
When Johannes Oporinus printed at Basel in 1543 the De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body), a large folio of 663 pages, what must have struck the reader at once was the title page—an engraving worthy of Dürer, which pictured Vesalius demonstrating the anatomy of an opened arm, with half a hundred students looking on. And then the illustrations: 277 woodcuts of unprecedented anatomical accuracy and high technical excellence, made mostly by Van Kalkar, with scientifically irrelevant and artistically attractive landscapes behind the figures—a skeleton, for example, at a reading desk. These cuts were so fine that some have thought they were designed in the studio of Titian, perhaps under his supervision; to which we must add that Vesalius drew several of them with his own hand. He accompanied the blocks watchfully in their journey by mule pack over the Alps from Venice to Basel. When the printing was complete the blocks were carefully preserved; later they were bought, exchanged, and lost; in 1893 they were found secreted in the library of the University of Munich; they were destroyed by bombing in the second World War.
What should have aroused more astonishment than these drawings was that the text—a triumph of typography but also a scientific revolution—was by a youth of twenty-nine. It was a revolution because it ended the reign of Galen in anatomy, revised the whole science in terms of dissection, and so established the physical basis of modern medicine, which begins with this book. Here fo
r the first time were described the true course of the veins and the anatomy of the heart; here was the epochal statement that the most careful dissection showed none of those pores through which Galen had supposed the blood to pass from one ventricle of the heart to the other; so the way was prepared for Servetus, Colombo, and Harvey. Galen was corrected again and again—on the liver, the bile ducts, the maxillae, the uterus. Vesalius, too, made errors, even of observation, and failed to take the great leap from the anatomy of the heart to the circulation of the blood. But here were accurate descriptions of scores of organs never so well described before, and every part of the body opened to science with a confident and masterly hand.
He suffered from the defects of his qualities. The pride that upheld him through years of minute study made him quick to take offense, slow to recognize the achievements of his predecessors and the sensitivity of his rivals. He was so in love with “that true Bible... the human body and the nature of man”59 that he hurt many theological toes. He referred sarcastically to the ecclesiastics who seemed most attracted to his lecture room when the reproductive organs were to be studied and shown.60 He made many enemies; and though Gesner and Fallopio hailed his work, most of the older professors, including his former teacher Dubois, condemned him as an insolent upstart, and sedulously picked flaws in his book. Dubois explained that Galen had not been wrong, but that the human body had changed since Galen’s time; so. he thought, the straight thigh bones, which, as everyone saw, were not curved in accordance with Galen’s description of them, were the result of the narrow trousers of Renaissance Europeans.61