there or thereabouts must it exist; and lo! on turning the far-seeing tube to the point in space that had been indicated, there, in verity, gleams a new world, then first seen of man though launched from some incalculably remote epoch in eternity to circle on the verge of the system whereof the sun is centre, and they who bade us look are hailed as discoverers in the highest sense of the word. Who will venture to dispute the merit here? Truly man does show the divinity within him when he uses his faculties-Godlike in themselves-in such God-like fashion. But Harvey's merit, to our mind, is of the self-same kind in another sphere. The facts he used were generally known to his predecessors for a century or more, and were referred to every day by teachers and contemporaries. Yet did no one, mastering them in their connection, rising superior to groundless hypotheses and accredited ideas, draw the inference that now meets us as irresistible, until the master-mind of Harvey gave it shape and utterance. To our appre

hension, Harvey was as far above his fellows as the eye of poetic intelligence that exultingly absorbs the glories of the starry sky and the green earth is above the mere physical sense that distinguishes light from darkness.

Dr. John Barclay, a fervent admirer of Harvey, whose name he never mentioned without the epithet immortal, has put the question of Harvey's merit both happily and eloquently; and it gives me pleasure after

sixty years since I heard it spoken, to quote the passage from the writings of my old master in anatomy. "The late Dr. Hunter," says Dr. Barclay,1 "has rather invidiously introduced Harvey along with Copernicus and Columbus, to show that his merit as a discoverer was comparatively low. But what did Copernicus and what did Columbus? Not in possession of more numerous facts than their contemporaries, but endowed with nobler and more vigorous intellects, the one developed the intricate system of the heavenly bodies, and the other discovered an unheard of Continent. And was it not in the same way, by the exertion of superior intellect, that Harvey made his immortal discovery? I know not what has happened in the world unseen; but if I may judge from the records of history and the annals of fame, the spirit of Bacon, the spirits of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton have been rejoiced to welcome and associate with the kindred spirit of Harvey."

Let us look a little more particularly at what Dr. Wm. Hunter has to say on the subject of merit in discovery, and try his conclusions by the test of rational criticism.

The three great discoveries of modern times, says Dr. Hunter, were the Western Hemisphere by Columbus, the Constitution of the Solar System by Copernicus, and the Circulation of the Blood by Harvey. But to these the like degree of honour, he

1 "On the Arteries," Introduction, p. ix.

thinks, does not attach; the discovery of Columbus standing in his opinion, in the first rank, that of Copernicus in the second, and that of Harvey, which he says, "must rank comparatively low," in the third. This estimate is open to challenge; and asks it all the more as Hunter shows himself animated by something like hostility to Harvey, and is inconsistent in what he says of him at one time with what he says at another. With the spirit of depreciation dominant, Dr. Hunter proceeds: "None of Harvey's writings show him to have been a man of uncommon abilities;" but then the sense of Harvey's true greatness, prevailing, he uses these words : " Harvey, as appears by his writings, was certainly a first-rate genius for sagacity and application, and his name is deservedly immortal." (!) Where he acquired most honour, however, Dr. Hunter is tempted to think that he deserved least. "So much had been discovered by others," Dr. Hunter continues, “that little was left for Harvey but to dress it up into a system. The singular structure of the parts concerned in the circulation so evidently proclaims the fact, that there seems to have been nothing more required than laying aside gross prejudices and considering fairly some obvious truths. It is indeed amazing that this discovery was left for Harvey; seeing that he was near a hundred years after Vesalius and the great anatomists who flourished in so many of the medical schools of Europe. And what is still more astonishing is this: that Servetus

first, and Columbus afterwards, had both given the circulation through the lungs, which we reckon at least three quarters of the discovery; and Cæsalpinus, many years before Harvey, published all that was wanting in Servetus to make the circulation complete. But Providence meant to reserve the honour for Harvey, and would not let men see what was before them, nor understand what they read."

In all this Dr. William Hunter only shows himself not above the mass of ill-informed and vulgar critics of Harvey's merits. What he speaks of as gross prejudices” were none such to those who entertained them, but sacred truths; and it is only by the light which he himself has from Harvey that he is privileged to see aright all that they saw awry, and to interpret truly what they read amiss. Providence we may be well assured was perfectly indifferent as to who should discover the circulation of the blood; but he who did in the end discover the great truth was surely something other, greater and nobler, than all the goodly men who had preceded him for thirteen centuries and more. Truly we think he was; and in our estimate of the rank due to the three great discoverers of the modern world, we do not hesitate to place Harvey beside and on the higher level with Copernicus. Their subjects differ in magnitude, in grandeur, indeed; but the mental powers that guided them alike to their conclusions were of the same order, and the character of the data on which their induc

tions rested was analogous. The great discovery of Columbus, on the contrary, was the product of imagination rather than of understanding, of hypothesis rather than of induction or the exercise of man's noblest attribute-Reason. Harvey's discovery, like that of Copernicus, was of the rational or inductive, therefore of the higher kind, and made in virtue of his superior endowment with intellectual power.

Dr. William Hunter, in his diatribe against Harvey, forgets how irksome and ungrateful is reasoning to the mass of mankind; how much less disposed they are to be quit of their errors than to hug them; and that physiology was one of the lazy-beds on which men laid them down longest contentedly to dream. The world had to wait for its Harvey as well as its Copernicus, Columbus and Luther, before it could be roused to the consciousness that there lay a way before as well as one behind it.

SECTION XII.

HARVEY'S ORIGINALITY. HE QUOTES NO AUTHORITIES.

THERE is yet another matter that requires a passing notice at our hands. Harvey has often been reproached of late with his failure to quote predecessors in the field of discovery which he made so completely his own as, in the minds of his countrymen

T