pent some nine years in the Paedagogium.

As illustrating how men will find what interests them in spite of
supposed lack of opportunities, it may be said that from his earliest
years Vesalius was noted for his tendency to be inquisitive with
regard to natural objects, and while still a mere boy his anatomical
curiosity manifested itself in a very practical way. He recalls
himself in later years, that the bladders with which he learned to
swim, and which were also used by the children of the time as
play-toys for making all sorts of noises, became in his hands objects
of anatomical investigation. Anatomy means the cutting up of things,
and this Vesalius literally did with the bladders. He noted
particularly that they were composed of layers and fibres of various
kinds, and later on when he was studying the veins in human and animal
bodies he was reminded of these early observations, and pointed out
that the vein walls were made up of structures not unlike those,
though more delicate, of which the bladders of his childhood days had
proven to be composed.

His preparatory studies over, Vesalius entered the {102} University of
Louvain, at that time one of the most important universities of
Europe. At the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth
century, Louvain probably had more students than any other university
in Europe except that of Paris, and possibly Bologna. There are good
grounds for saying that the number in attendance here during the first
half of the sixteenth century was always in excess of 5,000. The
university was especially famous for its teaching of jurisprudence and
philology. The faculty of theology, however, was considered to be one
of the strongest in Europe, and Louvain, as might be expected from its
position in the heart of Catholic Belgium, was generally acknowledged
to be one of the great intellectual bulwarks of Catholicity against
the progress of Lutheranism in the Teutonic countries at this time.
Vesalius's parents were, and his family always had been, ardent
Catholics, so that, quite apart from his dwelling not far away, it was
very natural that he should have been sent here. He seems to have
spent five years in the university mainly engaged in the study of
philosophy and philology, but also of the classics and languages so
far as they were taught at that time.

It may be noted as another instance in his life of how a student will
find that which appeals to him even in the mos