compound microscope and the telescope.  The former was invented about 1590 and the latter about 1608."(34) It was a fellow professor of the great genius Galileo who attempted to put into practice the experimental science of his friend.  With Sanctorius began the studies of temperature, respiration and the physics of the circulation.  The memory of this great investigator has not been helped by the English edition of his “De Statica Medicina,” not his best work, with a frontispiece showing the author in his dietetic balance.  Full justice has been done to him by Dr. Weir Mitchell in an address as president of the Congress of Physicians and Surgeons, 1891.(35) Sanctorius worked with a pulsilogue devised for him by Galileo, with which he made observations on the pulse.  He is said to have been the first to put in use the clinical thermometer.  His experiments on insensible perspiration mark him as one of the first modern physiologists.

     (34) Dannemann:  Die Naturwissenschaften in ihrer
     Entwickelung..., Vol.  II, p. 7, Leipzig, 1911.

     (35) See Transactions Congress Physicians and Surgeons, 1891, New
     Haven, 1892, ii, 159-181.

But neither Sanctorius nor Harvey had the immediate influence upon their contemporaries which the novel and stimulating character of their work justified.  Harvey’s great contemporary, Bacon, although he lost his life in making a cold storage experiment, did not really appreciate the enormous importance of experimental science.  He looked very coldly upon Harvey’s work.  It was a philosopher of another kidney, Rene Descartes, who did more than anyone else to help men to realize the value of the better way which Harvey had pointed out.  That the beginning of wisdom was in doubt, not in authority, was a novel doctrine in the world, but Descartes was no armchair philosopher, and his strong advocacy and practice of experimentation had a profound influence in directing men to “la nouvelle methode.”  He brought the human body, the earthly machine, as he calls it, into the sphere of mechanics and physics, and he wrote the first text-book of physiology, “De l’Homme.”  Locke, too, became the spokesman of the new questioning spirit, and before the close of the seventeenth century, experimental research became all the mode.  Richard Lower, Hooke and Hales were probably more influenced by Descartes than by Harvey, and they made notable contributions to experimental physiology in England.  Borelli, author of the famous work on “The Motion of Animals” (Rome, 1680-1681), brought to the study of the action of muscles a profound knowledge of physics and mathematics and really founded the mechanical, or iatromechanical school.  The literature and the language of medicine became that of physics and mechanics:  wheels and pulleys, wedges, levers, screws, cords, canals, cisterns, sieves and strainers, with angles, cylinders, celerity, percussion and resistance, were among the words that now came into use in medical