Johannes van Meurs, Icones, elogia ac vitae professorum Lugdunensium apud Batavos (Leiden: Andries Clouck, 1617).

Engravings showing the facilities available at the University of Leiden including the anatomical lecture theatre and the Library. They are taken from a volume which also includes engravings of the duelling courts and the botanical gardens, printed about 40 years after the University's foundation by William the Silent in 1575. At this time it was becoming a renowned centre for Reformed theology, science and medicine, and had already played host to such scholars as the philologist Joseph Justus Scaliger, the theologian Jacobus Arminius, and the jurist Hugo Grotius.

In the lecture theatre an anatomical dissection is taking place as skeletal observers look on, not all of whom are human. The Library on the other hand is a much more convivial place with dogs running around it as the patrons converse. The shelves are classified according to subject, and the books are chained to the shelves. The scene may not be altogether different from the one at St John's prior to the building of what is now the Old Library in the 1620's, when it too had a chained library. Many of the volumes in the current special collections bear the marks on their covers and leaves of their former chains.

Bequest of Wolley Leigh.