Page:The Harveian oration for 1874.djvu/31

 Harvey entered there, the annual stipend of the Professor of Practical Medicine was 1,000 florins, a sum equal to nearly 500 l. at the present day; and Fabricius himself, as Demonstrator of Anatomy, received 500 florins, or nearly 250 l., while as Professor of Anatomy and Surgery together he received more than double that sum. The number of students, indeed, had declined greatly in Harvey’s time, as it had in all the old universities, whose most prosperous time preceded the invention of printing, the new learning and its new modes of communication. Instead of 18,000, there were at the end of the 16th century not above 1,500 students; and the quaint old traveller Coryat, most unimaginative of men, but smitten with the plague of an insatiable curiosity which sent him wandering through Europe, to die at last in India, tells