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as "Anatomiste, botaniste, poète Allemand, savant presque universel."

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Albert Haller was born at Berne, on the 16th of October, 1708, of an ancient and respectable family. He was distinguished almost from his infancy by his extraordinary powers of acquiring knowledge. At the age of four years, he used to expound passages of Scripture to his father's servants; at eight years old, he had written 2000 notices of the lives of persons he had read about; at ten, he had made a vocabulary of the Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldee languages; at fifteen, he had composed tragedies, comedies, and an epic poem of 4000 verses, which he once risked his life to rescue from destruction, when his house was on fire, but which he afterwards himself committed to the flames when his judgment was more mature. His memory was most retentive. On one occasion he got nervous about it, thinking it impaired in consequence of a fall, and to test it went over the names of all the rivers in the world that fall into the sea. Having satisfied himself, by examining a map, that he had forgotten none, he was comforted. This was at a late period of life, when he was engaged in physiological studies.2

At the age of fifteen, he went to the University of Tübingen; and at seventeen, to Leyden, where Boerhaave was in the full blaze of his popularity. The young Haller was entirely captivated by this great teacher, and afterwards, as we have already had occasion to mention, he published, with Commentaries of his own, an edition of Boerhaave's Lectures. At the age of eighteen, in the year 1726, he took his degree; and chose for the subject of his thesis, the supposed discovery of a new salivary duct, which he demonstrated to be only a blood-vessel. He then visited the great seats of learning, and inade

1 Biograph. Universelle. Art. Haller.

2 Leben von Hernn, von Haller, von O. J. G. Zimmermann. Zurich, 1755.

the acquaintance of the most eminent men of his profession -in London, of Sir Hans Sloane and Cheselden; in Paris, of Jusseau, Winslow, and Le Dran; while in Basle, he studied mathematics under Bernoulli. After this extensive tour, he returned to his native town of Berne, where he occupied the posts of Physician to the Hospital, and Principal Librarian in the Museum of Books and Medals. A star of such magnitude as Haller, was not likely to escape the notice of the Elector of Hanover, and King of England, George II., who had just instituted the University of Göttingen, in which he offered him the chair of medicine, anatomy, and botany. Haller accepted the post, and was duly installed as one of the many distinguished teachers in that "famous university." Here he pursued his career of almost superhuman activity; writing light reviews incessantly, to the total amount it is said of 12,000; publishing occasionally such works as the "Life of Alfred the Great," showing great study of a remote and difficult period; so that any one living in the literary world alone, would naturally have supposed that this Haller was nothing but a littérateur, and one unusually busy and productive; whereas the fact was, that these efforts, which would have exhausted ordinary men, were to him only relaxation from his real work, which consisted in profound and original researches in anatomy and physiology. In the latter department his discoveries were so important, and his method so new, that, as Hippocrates is called the father of medicine, Bacon the father of modern philosophy, Boyle the father of chemistry,—so Haller has been, and is still, honoured with the proud appellation of the father of physiology.

In the words of Condorcet,'-“ Haller was aware that the science of physiology, long abandoned to the spirit of system, had become an object of distrust to "Éloge de M. de Haller," Euvres Complètes de Condorcet, t. I., p. 379.

some imaginary and unknown being, of whose existence, nature, actions, and manner of operation, we have not the least knowledge or assurance."

It is remarkable that Boerhaave, who was so thoroughly alive to the necessity of a rigid scrutiny of every explanation of a phenomenon, should have been so perfectly satisfied that the cause of animal heat was the attrition of the blood in its course of circulation. He seems impatient of contradiction in the matter, and utterly, almost contemptuously, rejects the notion of Lower and others, who derived the animal heat from the nitre to which it was exposed in the air received into the lungs a conjecture much nearer the mark than that of Boerhaave.

It is really amusing how he disposes of the obvious objection to his theory, that if animal heat depended upon the mechanical friction of the particles of the blood, we should have a similar effect in all hydraulic works. To this he replies, that blood is of a viscid and adhesive nature, and that it cannot be forced through the small vessels without producing great friction of its particles, and consequent heat. "It is, therefore, by the excess of force in the heart, that the animal heat is generated." 2 Yet, when Boerhaave taught this, he knew that Borelli had demonstrated that the sum of the cavities of the branches of an artery is always greater than that of the main trunk, so that the circulation is easier than would have been the case had they been of the same calibre; and moreover Boerhaave was perfectly aware that so far from the blood getting hotter as it recedes from the centre, it gets cooler, which, of course, it would not were his hypothesis correct. This is a good illustration of the fatal facility that is required for a popular teacher. Boerhaave undertook to explain the functions of the animal oeconomy, and here was a most important one, which it was his business to explain. He was not 1 Vol. I., p. 310. 2 Vol. II., p. 216.

there to excite doubts or to prosecute inquiries; he was there as a preacher to expound doctrines. Here then was an explanation which, on the whole, seemed the best, and was, therefore, to be accepted as the true one. Very rarely is the faculty of popular exposition united to an equal amount of that earnest inquisitiveness which makes the discoverer. The former is the expression of a satisfied, the latter of an unsatisfied, state of mind. Boerhaave was a man thoroughly satisfied with himself and everything about him.

We might give innumerable illustrations of the superficial character of Boerhaave's method of dealing with the problems he had to explain, and the curious arguments he used to controvert his opponents. For example, he tells us that a celebrated Professor of his own University explained catalepsy by the supposition that it was caused by "a congelation of the animal spirits by a volatile, alkaline salt, in the same manner as alcohol and sal ammoniac do, upon mixture, form a solid body." Now, one might expect a disciple of Bacon to have dealt in a very summary way with such an hypothesis as this, by denying the existence of any such asserted cause, or the efficiency of such cause if actually existing. But Boerhaave meets the chemist on his own ground, and replies that the juice of the brain does not manifest any phlogistic quality, but extinguishes a flame when thrown upon it! How much he was influenced by the mechanical and chemical schools, is shown by his notion of the mode in which the nervous fluid is prepared. "The matter from whence the juices or spirits of the brain are prepared, is the viscid and tenacious serum of the blood, which, by passing through many degrees of attenuation, at length acquires the subtlety of a spirit, after its particles have been moulded or framed by passing frequently through the smallest series of vessels 1 Vol. II., par. 277.

in the body; passing from blood into serum, from serum into lymph, from lymph of the first order into all the several orders; till at last, losing the nature of lymph, it acquires the subtle one of a spirit!" This is certainly spirit very much above proof. It is, after all, much the same notion, only worked out with more detail of chemical technicality, as that of Hoffmann,—and, indeed, of a great many more—that the spirit of man is a distillation of the body of man, and that the regions beyond our investigation are peopled with these volatile emanations, which retain the form of the human frame, but are without any of its other sensible properties-the ghost of Patroclus, as seen by Achilles, six thousand years ago, at the siege of Troy, and the ghost of the spirit-rapper as seen at Troy in the United States of America, in the present day. He speaks elsewhere approvingly of a notion, "that there is internally concealed a spirituous or nervous man, which governs the whole machine."1 What is this but the ghost ?2

We may give another striking illustration of the danger of being satisfied by an ingenious superficial explanation of strange occurrence. He mentions a fish, resembling a skate, which, when touched, benumbs the hand, and explains it by the agitation of the skin, which is thrown into tremors by the subcutaneous muscle. "To me," he adds, "the whole affair seems to be no great difficulty; when a saw which is very tight and short is sharpened by a file, or a glass ball is sawed by a knife, or a short tense chord is scraped by the bow-all these operations give rise to such an intolerable shrieking noise as to set the teeth on edge. By the same reason, when the torpedo fish excites tremors in its muscles, similar tremors are excited in the nerves of the person who touches it.' What was no

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body pneumatical were liberated by
any process, would it not directly act
upon the nervous man or pneuma ?
3 Vol. III., par. 484.

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