CAROLUS IO: A IESU

OF THE REGULAR CLERICS

Of the Poor Clerics of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools,

Superior General

Nearly on the anniversary of the day on which we mourned the loss of the distinguished man Io. Alphonso Borelli, taken from our eyes two years ago, The Second Part of his Work on the Movement of Animals provides consolation, as it exhibits him to our memory and that of learned men as if he were alive again. For what life is more vigorous and perennial than that which, entrusted to learned pages, flies constantly through the learned mouths and hands of men, without fear of those things which, when they wish to be turbulent, are playthings for the rapid winds? The Author himself already intimated in the preface of the first Part what is set forth in this second one. He examines, namely, internal motions, the composition of muscles, the pulsation of the heart; how the fountain of blood runs out through the rivulets of the veins and circles the field of the entire body in perpetual motion; he investigates the origin, organs, and use of respiration; he explains the spirits and the nervous fluids to which he attributes the primary motions of the Animal; he describes digestion and chyle, and how nutrition is effected after various excrements are cast out through multiple channels: he discusses most skillfully sleep, wakefulness, the causes and periods of fevers, and the other affections of life and health, whether adverse or prosperous; and he does so with a Theory so easy, and indeed with a Mechanics so plausible and evident, that the hidden paths of Nature and the wonderful compaction of Sentient and Vegetating beings might have been taught by Nature herself in a certain cave, as if by Egeria