r becoming the fellow-pupil and the
friend of Rondelet, and probably also of Rabelais and those other
luminaries of Montpellier, of whom I spoke in my essay on Rondelet, he
returned to Paris to study under old Sylvius, whose real name was Jacques
Dubois, alias Jock o' the Wood; and to learn less--as he complains
himself--in an anatomical theatre than a butcher might learn in his shop.

Were it not that the whole question of dissection is one over which it is
right to draw a reverent veil, as a thing painful, however necessary and
however innocent, it would be easy to raise ghastly laughter in many a
reader by the stories which Vesalius himself tells of his struggles to
learn anatomy. How old Sylvius tried to demonstrate the human frame from
a bit of a dog, fumbling in vain for muscles which he could not find, or
which ought to have been there, according to Galen, and were not; while
young Vesalius, as soon as the old pedant's back was turned, took his
place, and, to the delight of the students, found for him--provided it
were there--what he could not find himself;--how he went body-snatching
and gibbet-robbing, often at the danger of his life, as when he and his
friend were nearly torn to pieces by the cannibal dogs who haunted the
Butte de Montfaucon, or place of public execution;--how he acquired, by a
long and dangerous process, the only perfect skeleton then in the world,
and the hideous story of the robber to whom it had belonged--all these
horrors those who list may read for themselves elsewhere. I hasten past
them with this remark--that to have gone through the toils, dangers, and
disgusts which Vesalius faced, argued in a superstitious and cruel age
like his, no common physical and moral courage, and a deep conscience
that he was doing right, and must do it at all risks in the face of a
generation which, peculiarly reckless of human life and human agony,
allowed that frame which it called the image of God to be tortured,
maimed, desecrated in every way while alive; and yet--straining at the
gnat after having swallowed the camel--forbade it to be examined when
dead, though for the purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind.

The breaking out of war between Francis I. and Charles V. drove Vesalius
back to his native country and Louvain; and in 1535 we hear of him as a
surgeon in Charles V.'s army. He saw, most probably, the Emperor's
invasion of Provence, and the disastrous retreat from before
Montmorency's