ng surface to the flame
That others kindle.

But between Mundinus and Vesalius, anatomy had been studied by a group
of men to whom I must, in passing, pay a tribute. The great artists
Raphael, Michael Angelo and Albrecht Durer were keen students of the
human form. There is an anatomical sketch by Michael Angelo in the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, which I here reproduce.(*) Durer's famous work
on "Human Proportion," published in 1528, contains excellent figures,
but no sketches of dissections. But greater than any of these, and
antedating them, is Leonardo da Vinci, the one universal genius in
whom the new spirit was incarnate--the Moses who alone among his
contemporaries saw the promised land. How far Leonardo was indebted to
his friend and fellow student, della Torre, at Pavia we do not know,
nor does it matter in face of the indubitable fact that in the
many anatomical sketches from his hand we have the first accurate
representation of the structure of the body. Glance at the three figures
of the spine which I have had photographed side by side, one from
Leonardo, one from Vesalius and the other from Vandyke Carter, who did
the drawings in Gray's "Anatomy" (1st ed., 1856). They are all of the
same type, scientific, anatomical drawings, and that of Leonardo was
done fifty years before Vesalius! Compare, too, this figure of the
bones of the foot with a similar one from Vesalius.(24) Insatiate
in experiment, intellectually as greedy as Aristotle, painter, poet,
sculptor, engineer, architect, mathematician, chemist, botanist,
aeronaut, musician and withal a dreamer and mystic, full accomplishment
in any one department was not for him! A passionate desire for a mastery
of nature's secrets made him a fierce thing, replete with too much
rage! But for us a record remains--Leonardo was the first of modern
anatomists, and fifty years later, into the breach he made, Vesalius
entered.(25)

(*) This plate was lacking among the author's illustrations, but
the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum remembers his repeatedly
showing special interest in the sketch reproduced in John
Addington Symonds's Life of Michelangelo, London, 1893, Vol. I,
p. 44, and in Charles Singer's Studies in the History and Method
of Science, Oxford, 1917, Vol. I, p. 97, representing Michael
Angelo and a friend dissecting the body of a man, by the light of
a candle fixed in the body itself.--Ed.

(24) He was the fi