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).