Page:History of the Literature of the Scandinavian North.djvu/185

Rh combined a knowledge of several branches of knowledge with a complete mastery of one as his specialty. Among his pupils were many able men, among whom was also his own son, Kaspar Bartholin (1655-1738), a most excellent physician and anatomist.

A still more distinguished disciple of Bartholin was Ole Borch (1626-1690). Like his teacher he was also a polyhistor, but in a much wider sense, for he distinguished himself as philosopher, chemist, anatomist, botanist, physician, and philologist, and in all of these branches he wrote works of acknowledged merit. But chemistry and Latin were his specialties. In Latin he wrote poems, which, in their day, were received with great favor.

Niels Stensen (1638-1686) was also one of Bartholin's scholars and probably the most distinguished one of them all. There is no doubt that in this period he ranks "second only to Tyge Brahe." Having for several years studied medicine and anatomy in Copenhagen he went to Leyden to complete his studies. Here he made several very important anatomical discoveries, and when he afterwards came to Paris his skilful directions attracted such wide attention that already in his thirtieth year he was regarded as the first anatomist of Europe. In Paris he fell in with Bossuet and at the instigation of the latter he was misled into religious musings to which he, at times, would almost wholly abandon himself. During his stay in Florence, where he had been appointed professor of anatomy at the Academy del Cimento, he went over to Catholicism. Still, he once more gathered his strength for hard work in the field of science, and in so doing he laid the foundation of an entirely new branch of study, viz: of geognosy. During his stay in Italy he studied the mountain formations, made examinations of fossils, etc., and the result of these investigations is embodied in his "De solido intra