much alike, that they cannot be distinguished by the eye."

Harvey, we may venture to say, could hardly be expected to see the heart otherwise than as the source and seat of the heat of the body. The animals that are lowest in the scale of evolution, he thinks, are the coldest, because they have no heart. Of a simple homogeneous nature, they do not require an impeller of nourishment into complex and distant parts. In molluscous animals, however, such as snails and whelks, and in transparent shrimps, a heart can be seen pulsating distinctly enough; and when we come to insects-bees, hornets, and the like, we also, with the aid of a magnifying glass, perceive something pulsating, for in them there is variety of organic structure; but the pulsations occur irregularly, and in the cold even cease entirely. This is the case with those insects, particularly, which hide away in winter and lie defunct as it were, manifesting a kind of vegetable life only. Whether the same thing happens in animals that have red blood, such as frogs, serpents, tortoises, swallows, &c., is a question. The swallow, it may perhaps be held needless to observe, was vulgarly believed in Harvey's day to hybernate at the bottom of ponds and rivers; and it seems not to have fallen in his way to question the absurdity.

To conclude with this part of our subject, how shall we think too highly of him who descanting on "nature as ever perfect and divine, doing nothing in vain,

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neither giving a heart where it was not wanted, nor witholding it where its office was required," goes on to say, “but by the same stages in the development of every animal, passing through the constitutions of all, I may say―ovum, worm, embryo-it acquires additional perfection in each." Have we not here the first brief intimation of the great Evolution Theory, that has been as a new revelation in the physics of life to our modern world?

SECTION III.

RECEPTION OF THE EXERCISES ON THE HEART AND

BLOOD.

THE appearance of Harvey's Book on the motion of the heart and blood, seems almost immediately to have arrested the attention of all the better minds among the medical men of Europe. The subject was not one, indeed, greatly calculated to interest mere practitioners, but anatomists, physiologists, and scientific physicians appear at once to have taken it in hand and canvassed its merits. The conclusions come to in the work, there can be no question, took the medical world by surprise; it was not prepared for such a proposition as a ceaseless circular movement of one kind of blood, with the heart as the propelling power. As it had been to all the older anatomists, the heart

was still the source of the native heat, the concocter of the blood, and the laboratory of the vital spirits ; the main cause of the to-and-fro motion of the blood being the attraction of the parts for the nutriment they required, on the one hand; the attraction of the heart aided by its diastole and the heave of the chest in breathing, on the other.

By all the older intellects in possession of the seats of authority, Harvey's views were regarded as idle dreams; and it was upon the faith of this conclusion, that their author was set down by them as a mere fanciful innovator. No one in those days either claimed for himself or for another so extravagant a notion as Harvey had been reckless enough to enunciate. Ascribed to any respectable member of the medical profession, his immediate business would have been to purge himself of the imputation. In Harvey's lifetime, and for a good while after, indeed, it was never his title to be accounted the discoverer of the circulation of the blood that was matter of question, but the fact of there being any such circulation of the blood as he proclaimed. Two years, in fact, elapsed before anything in contravention of the new doctrine saw the light, and a considerably longer time before aught like credit came to be connected with the discovery, or hints to be thrown out that it was no discovery at all, but an old idea revived. It was only after men had familiarized their minds with the novel truth that they began to find a circular motion of the blood announced

in quarters where nothing of the kind had ever been suspected before-in Hippocrates and Galen, in Servetus, Colombus, Sarpi, Casalpinus, anywhere, everywhere but where alone it was to be found — the "Anatomical Exercises on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals" by William Harvey.

When opposition to his great Induction arose, it was not at first from any of the more mature anatomists of Europe. Their minds were made up on the matter; the thing was absurd and there an end; nothing more need be said on the subject. It proceeded from a young physician, Primerose by name, of Scottish descent, but French by birth and education. Primerose had been a pupil of Joannes Riolanus, Professor of Anatomy in the University of Paris, an inconsistent but determined enemy of Harvey to the end of his days. Primerose had of course listened to his master's diatribes on the untenable nature of Harvey's views, and by way of exercising his ingenuity, set himself the task of trying the question, not by fact and experiment, but by texts from the ancients and such precepts as he had imbibed from his teacher. The essay of Primerose1 may therefore be briefly characterized as a defence of the physiological ideas of Galen against the innovations of Harvey; and is remarkable for everything rather than a spirit of candour in pursuit of truth. It abounds in obstinate

1 Entitled Exercitationes et Animadversiones in Librum Harvei de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis. 4to. London, 1630.

denials, sometimes of what may be called perversions, of statements involving matters of fact; and in its whole course appeals not once to experiment as a means of investigation.

Harvey, having in the preliminary chapter of his work demonstrated the notions which it was Primerose's purpose to reassert and defend to be in contradiction with reason and experience, deigned him no reply; he could not think of going over the ground he had already trodden and shown to be utterly barren, in the hope of convincing such an antagonist.

Æmylius Parisanus,' a physician of Venice, was the next to assail the Harveian doctrine of the circulation, and still on the old grounds-the authority of Galen and the ancients generally. Parisanus perceived Harvey's views as directly contravening an hypothesis to which he had committed himself, namely, that the spleen was the organ of sanguification and furnisher of nutriment to the heart, and so may have been led to enter the lists against the new opinions. But he proved a most flimsy antagonist. Ignorant of some of the commonest points of anatomy, and fre

'In his work entitled Lapis Lydius de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis. Folio. Venet. 1635. In an edition of his "Refutation" to which I have had access, published at Leyden in 1639, the number of pages to which it extends is 267 in small 4to. Harvey's Exercitationes are all comprised in 72 pages of the same sized sheet! It is an out-and-out defence of all the indefensible propositions of the old physiology; and three paragraphs in succession, contradictory to as many self-evident propositions, commence thus: Bone Deus! Deus Optime! Deus plusquam Optime !"

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