CHAPTER XV - SCIENCE

Summary

The earlier half of the sixteenth century saw the publication of important and even revolutionary new works in various fields—notably the De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium of Copernicus and the De Humani Corporis Fabrica of Vesalius, both published coincidentally in 1543—and the introduction of new ideas and methods in other fields besides astronomy and anatomy. The work of Paracelsus and Fernel in medicine, of Belon and Rondelet in zoology, of Carden and Tartaglia in mathematics, of Nuñez, Oronce Finé and Gemma Frisius in navigation and cartography, was all complete by mid-century. The major work of Kepler, Galileo and Harvey was not begun until 1610 or later. The men of the later sixteenth century were consolidators and continuers rather than innovators. With the exception of Tycho Brahe and William Gilbert there are few great names or startling ideas; yet it was in this period that the men who were to make the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century grew to manhood and it was by the scientists and scientific literature of this age that they were trained and prepared for innovation. Fabricius of Aquapendente, a respectably second-class scientist himself, has more often been remembered as the teacher of Harvey than for his own accomplishments. Yet, though the scientists of the later sixteenth century were in general of no very original turn of mind, they had an important role to play: they provided a necessary and salutary link between the respect for authority which prompted the innovations of the earlier sixteenth century and the consciousness of novelty that prompted the innovations of the seventeenth century.