anticipated by the activity of a freer and less protected people; since the micrometer was invented by Gascoigne, in or just before 1639, when the English monarch, so far from having leisure to patronize science, was about to embark in that struggle which, ten years later, cost him his crown and his life.25

26

The absence in France, during this period, not only of great discoveries, but also of mere practical ingenuity, is certainly very striking. In investigations requiring minute accuracy, the necessary tools, if at all complicated, were made by foreigners, the native workmen being too unskilled to construct them; and Dr. Lister, who was a very competent judge, and who was in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century, supplies evidence that the best mathematical instruments sold in that city were made, not by a Frenchman, but by Butterfield, an Englishman residing there.27 Nor did they succeed better in matters of immediate and obvious utility. The improvements effected in manufactures were few and insignificant, and were calculated not for the comfort of the people, but for the luxury of the idle classes. 28 What was really valuable was neglected; no great invention was made; and by the end of the reign of Louis XIV. scarcely any thing had been done in machinery, or in those other contrivances which, by economizing national labour, increase national wealth.29

Biog. Univ. vol. xxxiv. p. 253. See also Préface de l'Hist. de 'lAcad. des Sciences, in Euvres de Fontenelle, Paris, 1766, vol. x. p. 20.

25 The best account I have seen of the invention of the micrometer, is in Mr. Grant's recent work, History of Physical Astronomy, pp. 428, 450-453, where it is proved that Gascoigne invented it in 1639, or possibly a year or two earlier. Compare Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. iii. p. 52; who also ascribes it to Gascoigne, but erroneously dates it in 1640. Montucla (Hist. des Mathémat. vol. ii. pp. 570, 571) admits the priority of Gascoigne; but underrates his merit, being apparently unacquainted with the evidence which Mr. Grant subsequently adduced.

*For a short account of this able man, see Lankester's Mem. of Ray, p. 17.

Notwithstanding the strong prejudice then existing against Englishmen, Butterfield was employed by "the king and all the princes." Lister's Account of Paris at the close of the seventeenth century, edited by Dr. Henning, p. 85. Fontenelle mentions "M. Hubin," as one of the most celebrated makers in Paris in 1687 (Eloge d'Amontons, in Euvres de Fontenelle, Paris, 1766, vol. v. p. 113); but has forgotten to state that he too was an Englishman. "Lutetiæ sedem posuerat ante aliquod tempus Anglus quidam nomine Hubinus, vir ingeniosus, atque hujusmodi machinationum peritus opifex et industrius. Hominem adii," &c. Huetii Commentarius de Rebus ad eum pertinentibus, p. 346. Thus, again, in regard to time-keepers, the vast superiority of the English makers, late in the reign of Louis XIV., was equally in contestable. Compare Biog. Univ. vol. xxiv. pp. 242, 243, with Brewster's Life of Newton, vol. ii. p. 262; and as to the middle of the reign of Louis XIV., see Eloge de Sebastien, in Euvres de Fontenelle, vol. vi. pp. 332, 333.

28

"Les manufactures étaient plutôt dirigés vers le brillant que vers l'utile. On s'efforça, par un arrêt du mois de mars 1700, d'extirpir, ou du moins de réduire beaucoup les fabriques de bas au métier. Malgré cette fausse direction, les objets d'un luxe très-recherché faisaient des progrès bien lents. En 1687, après la mort de Colbert, la cour soldait encore l'industrie des barbares, et faisait fabriquer et broder ses plus beaux habits à Constantinople." Lemontey, Etablissement de Louis XIV, p. 364. Lacretelle (Dix-huitième Siècle, vol. ii. p. 5) says, that during the last thirty years of the reign of Louis XIV. "les manufactures tombaient."

29 Cuvier (Biog. Univ. vol. xxxvii. p. 199) thus describes the condition of France

While such was the state, not only of mathematical and astronomical science, but also of mechanical and inventive arts, corresponding symptoms of declining power were seen in other departments. In physiology, in anatomy, and in medicine, we look in vain for any men equal to those by whom France had once been honoured. The greatest discovery of this kind ever made by a Frenchman, was that of the receptable of the chyle; a discovery which, in the opinion of a high authority, is not inferior to that of the circulation of the blood by Harvey.30 This important step in our knowledge is constantly assigned to the age of Louis XIV., as if it were one of the results of his gracious bounty; but it would be difficult to tell what Louis had to do with it, since the discovery was made by Pecquet in 1647,31 when the great king was nine years old. After Pecquet, the most eminent of the French anatomists in the seventeenth century was Riolan; and his name we also find among the illustrious men who adorned the reign of Louis XIV. But the principal works of Riolan were written before Louis XIV. was born; his last work was published in 1652; and he himself died in 1657.32 Then there came à pause, and, during three generations, the French did nothing for these great subjects; they wrote no work upon them which is now read, they made no discoveries, and they seemed to have lost all heart, until that revival of knowledge, which, as we shall presently see, took place in France about the middle of the eighteenth century. In the practical parts of medicine, in its speculative parts, and in the arts connected with surgery, the same law prevails. The French, in these, as in other matters, had formerly produced men of great eminence, who had won for themselves an European reputation, and whose works are still remembered. Thus, only to mention two or three instances, they had a long line of illustrious physicians, among whom Fernel and Joubert were the earliest; they had, in surgery, Ambroise Paré, who not only

only seven years after the death of Louis XIV.: “Nos forges etaient alors presque dans l'enfance; et nous ne faisions point d'acier: tout celui qu'éxigeaient les dif ferents métiers nous venait de l'étranger. . . . Nous ne faisions point non plus alors de fer-blanc, et il ne nous venait que de l'Allemagne."

30"Certainement la découverte de Pecquet ne brille pas moins dans l'histoire de notre art que la vérité démontrée pour la première fois par Harvey." Sprengel, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. iv. p. 208.

Henle (Anatomie Générale, vol. ii. p. 106) says, that the discovery was made in 1649; but the historians of medicine assign it to 1647. Sprengel, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. iv. pp. 207, 405; Renouard, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. ii. p. 173.

Biog. Univ. vol. xxxviii. pp. 123, 124.

33 Some of the great steps taken by Joubert are concisely stated in Broussais, Examen des Doctrines Médicales, vol. i. pp. 293, 294, vol. iii. p. 361. Compare Spren gel, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. iii. p. 210. Fernel, though enthusiastically praised by Patin, was probably hardly equal to Joubert. Lettres de Patin, vol. iii. pp. 59, 199,

introduced important practical improvements, but who has the still rarer merit of being one of the founders of comparative osteology; and they had Baillou, who, late in the sixteenth and early in the seventeenth century, advanced pathology, by connecting it with the study of morbid anatomy.36 Under Louis XIV. all this was changed. Under him, surgery was neglected, though in other countries its progress was rapid.37 The English, by the middle of the seventeenth century, had taken considerable steps in medicine; its therapeutical branch being reformed chiefly by Sydenham, its physiological branch by Glisson.38 But the age of Louis XIV. cannot boast of a single medical writer who can be compared to these; not even one whose name is now known as having made any specific addition to our knowledge. In Paris, the practice of medicine was notoriously inferior to that in the capitals of Germany, Italy, and England; while in the French provinces, the ignorance, even of the best physicians, was scandalous.39 Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, during the whole of this long period, the French in these matters effected comparatively nothing; they made no

648. At p. 106, Patin calls Fernel "le premier médecin de son temps, et peut-être le plus grand qui sera jamais."

4 See a summary of them in Sprengel, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. iii. pp. 405, 406, vol. vii. pp. 14, 15. Sir Benjamin Brodie (Lectures on Surgery, p. 21) says, "Few greater benefits have been conferred on mankind than that for which we are indebted to Ambrose Parey-the application of a ligature to a bleeding artery."

35"C'était là une vue très ingénieuse et très juste qu'Ambroise Paré donnait pour la première fois. C'était un commencement d'ostéologie comparée." Cuvier, Hist. des Sciences, part ii. p. 42. To this I may add, that he is the first French writer on medical jurisprudence. See Paris and Fonblanque's Medical Jurispru dence, 1823, vol. i. p. xviii.

36 "L'un des premiers auteurs à qui l'on doit des observations cadavériques sur les maladies, est le fameux Baillou." Broussais, Examen des Doctrines Médicales, vol. ii. p. 218. See also vol. iii. p. 362; and Renouard, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. ii. p. 89. The value of his services is recognized in a recent able work, Phillips on Scrofula, 1846, p. 16.

$7 "The most celebrated surgeon of the sixteenth century was Ambroise Paré. From the time of Paré until the commencement of the eighteenth century, surgery was but little cultivated in France. Mauriceau, Saviard, and Belloste, were the only French surgeons of note who could be contrasted with so many eminent men of other nations. During the eighteenth century, France produced two surgeons of extraordinary genius; these are Petit and Desault." Bowman's Surgery, in Encyclop. of Medical Sciences, 1847, 4to, pp. 829, 830.

35 It is unnecessary to adduce evidence respecting the services rendered by Sydenham, as they are universally admitted; but what, perhaps, is less generally known, is, that Glisson anticipated those important views concerning irritability, which were afterwards developed by Haller and Gorter. Compare Renouard, Hist. de la Méde cine, vol. ii. p. 192; Elliotson's Human Physiol. p. 471; Bordas Demoulin, Carté, sianisme, vol. i. p. 170. In Wagner's Physiol. 1841, p 655, the theory is too exclu sively ascribed to Haller.

Of this, we have numerous complaints from foreigners who visted France. I will quote the testimony of one celebrated man. In 1699, Addison writes from Blois: "I made use of one of the physicians of this place, who are as cheap as out English farriers, and generally as ignorant." Aikin's Life of Addison, vol. i. p. 74.

contributions to clinical literature," and scarcely any to therapeutics, to pathology, to physiology, or to anatomy."

42

In what are called the natural sciences, we also find the French now brought to a stand. In zoology, they had formerly possessed remarkable men, among whom Belon and Rondelet were the most conspicuous; but, under Louis XIV., they did not produce one original observer in this great field of inquiry.43 In chemistry, again, Rey had, in the reign of Louis XIII., struck out views of such vast importance, that he anticipated some of those generalizations which formed the glory of the French intellect in the eighteenth century. During the corrupt and frivolous age of Louis XIV., all this was forgotten; the labours of Rey were neglected; and so complete was the indifference, that even the celebrated experiments of Boyle remained unknown in France for more than forty years after they were published.45

Connected with zoology, and, to a philosophic mind, inseparable from it, is botany; which, occupying a middle place between the animal and mineral world, indicates their relation to each other, and at different points touches the confines of both. It also throws great light on the functions of nutrition, and on

46

40 Indeed, France was the last great country in Europe in which a chair of clinical medicine was established. See Renouard, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. ii. p. 312; and Bouillaud, Philos. Médicale, p. 114.

"M. Bouillaud, in his account of the state of medicine in the seventeenth century, does not mention a single Frenchman during this period. See Bouillaud, Philosophie Médicale, pp. 13 seq. During many years of the power of Louis XIV., the French academy only possessed one anatomist; and of him, few students of physiology have ever heard: "M. du Verney fut assez long-temps le seul anatomiste de l'académie, et ce ne fut qu'en 1684 qu'on lui joignit M. Mery." Eloge de Du Verney, in Euvres de Fontenelle, vol. vi. p. 392.

42 Cuvier, Hist. des Sciences, part ii. pp. 64-73, 76-80.

43 After Belon, nothing was done in France for the natural history of animals until 1734, when there appeared the first volume of Reaumur's great work. See Swainson on the Study of Nat. Hist. pp. 24, 43.

"On this remarkable man, who was the first philosophic chemist Europe produced, and who, so early as 1630, anticipated some of the generalizations made a hundred and fifty years later by Lavoisier, see Liebig's Letters on Chemistry, pp. 46, 47; Thomson's Hist. of Chemistry, vol. ii. pp. 95, 96; Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 729; Cuvier, Progrès des Sciences, vol. i. p. 30.

45 Cuvier (Progrès des Sciences, vol. i. p. 30) says of Rey, "son écrit était tombé dans l'oubli le plus profond;" and, in another work, the same great authority writes (Hist. des Sciences, part ii. p. 333): "Il y avait plus de quarante ans que Becker avait présenté sa nouvelle théorie, développée par Stahl; il y avait encore plus longtemps que les expériences de Boyle sur la chimie pneumatique avaient été publiées, et dependant rien de tout cela n'entrait encore dans l'enseignement général de la chimie, du moins en France."

The highest present generalizations of the laws of nutrition are those by M. Chevreul; which are thus summed up by MM. Robin et Verdeil, in their admirable work, Chimie Anatomique, vol. i. p. 203, Paris, 1853: "En passant des plantes aux animaux, nous voyons que plus l'organisation de ces derniers est compliquée, plus les aliments dont ils se nourrissent sont complexes et analogues par leurs principes im. médiats aux principes des organes qu'ils doivent entretenir.

“En définitive, on voit que les végétaux se nourrissent d'eau, d'acide carbonique,

47

the laws of development; while, from the marked analogy be tween animals and vegetables, we have every reason to hope that its further progress, assisted by that of electricity, will prepare the way for a comprehensive theory of life, to which the resources of our knowledge are still unequal, but towards which the movements of modern science are manifestly tending. On these grounds, far more than for the sake of practical advantages, botany will always attract the attention of thinking men; who, neglecting views of immediate utility, look to large and ultimate results, and only value particular facts in so far as they facilitate the discovery of general truths. The first step in this noble study was taken towards the middle of the sixteenth century, when authors, instead of copying what previous writers had said, began to observe nature for themselves. The next step was, to add experiment to observation; but it required another hundred years before this could be done with accuracy; because the microscope, which is essential to such inquiries, was only invented about 1620, and the labour of a whole generation was needed to make it available for minute investigations. So soon, however, as this resource was sufficiently matured to be applied to plants, the march of botany became rapid, at least as far as details are concerned; for it was not until the eighteenth century that the facts were actually generalized. But, in the preliminary work of accumulating the facts, great energy was shown; and, for reasons stated in an earlier part of the Introduction, this, like other studies relating to the external world, advanced with peculiar speed during the reign of Charles II. The trachea of plants were discovered by Henshaw in 1661;19

43

d'autres gaz et de matières organiques à l'état d'engrais, ou en d'autres termes altérées, c'est-à-dire ramenées à l'état de principes plus simples, plus solubles. Au contraire, les animaux plus élevés dans l'échelle organique ont besoin de matières bien plus complexes quant aux principes immédiats qui les composent, et plus variées dans leurs propriétés."

47 Brunfels in 1530, and Fuchs in, 1542, were the two first writers who observed the vegetable kingdom for themselves, instead of copying what the ancients had said. Compare Whewell's Hist. of the Sciences, vol. iii. pp. 305, 306, with Pulteney's Hist. of Botany, vol. i. p. 38.

48 The microscope was exhibited in London, by Drebbel, about 1620; and this appears to be the earliest unquestionable notice of its use, though some writers assert that it was invented at the beginning of the seventeenth century, or even in 1590. Compare the different statements, in Pouillet, Elémens de Physique, vol. ii. p. 357; Humboldt's Cosmos, vol. ii. pp. 699, 700; Sprengel, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. iv. p. 337; Winckler, Gesch. der Botanik, p. 136; Quekett's Treatise on the Microscope, 1848, p. 2; Cuvier, Hist. des Sciences, part ii. p. 470; Hallam's Lit. of Europe, vol. iii. p. 202; Leslie's Nat. Philos. p. 52. On the subsequent improvement of the mi croscope during the seventeenth century, see Brewster's Life of Newton, vol. i. pp. 29, 242, 243.

49 See Balfour's Botany, p. 15. In Pulteney's Progress of Botany in England, this beautiful discovery is, if I rightly remember, not even alluded to; but it appears, from a letter written in 1672, that it was then becoming generally known, and had