What seventeenth-century person fits all these descriptions:
(1) He showed that Descartes's physiology (particularly his views about the heart and the pineal gland) was wrong;
(2) He was Danish;
(3) He was originally a Lutheran, but then became Catholic;
(4) He corresponded with Leibniz and Spinoza;
(5) He has a gland named after him (the lateral nasal gland), which he discovered (it was, however, one of the few glands whose function he did not discover or confirm);
(6) He discovered tear ducts;
(7) He has sometimes been called the father of stratigraphy, of dynamic geology, and of paleontology;
(8) His name is associated with the geological 'law of superposition';
(9) T. H. Huxley noted that he had laid the basic foundations for all paleontology;
(20) His studies of the heart led him to discover sino-atrial and atrio-ventricular dissociation;
(11) He proved that the heart was a muscle;
(12) While he was limited by not having a way to set the brain (usually done now by formaldehyde, if I understand correctly), thus making dissection extremely difficult, he was the first person to lay out in clear terms the best way to study the brain anatomically;
(13) He was the first to discover the mammalian ovarian follicle;
(14) Although it was still somewhat crude, he seems to have been the first to attempt a geometric classification of crystals;
(15) He became tutor and moral preceptor to Ferdinandino, the son of Cosimo III of Florence;
(16) He was appointed by Innocent IX to be apostolic vicar of the norther missions, and was consecrated the titular bishop of Titiopolis;
(17) He was beatified by John Paul II in 1988 (his feast day is his birthday, December 5), and it is entirely possible that he will become the first geologist-saint;
(18) His most famous quotation: Pulchra sunt quae videntur, pulchriora quae sciuntur, longe pulcherrima quae ignorantur. "Beatiful are the things that are seen; more beautiful are the things that are known; by far the most beautiful are the things that are not known."
(19) He accomplished all the scientific work mentioned above before the age of thirty-six.
I happened to bring him up in a digressive comment on a post at Mixing Memory; I've intended to write up something on him for some time now, but haven't had the chance. I probably won't for a while, either; so I thought I'd just put this post out as an appetizer. If you're interested in further information, it's hard to find things, and what there is, isn't always accurate (the reason I've been so slow in getting around to posting on him). But, if I recall correctly, Stephen Jay Gould has an essay on him in Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, which would probably be the most easily accessible source of information on him. See also this website, which gives a taste, but barely touches on most of his work (as far as I can see, too, the only scientific colleague who was dismayed by his retirement from scientific work was Leibniz; as Troels Kardel has pointed out, the danger of refuting so many of the major scientific men of one's day is that they don't always take it very well when you show them up, and he seems to have made a lot of enemies that way).
