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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. 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.”

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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

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at least, to have dwarfed and made unconspicuous all who had gone before him. But the charge is easily met: Harvey had from no one that which he gave to the world as his own. He was not the historian of opinions, but the propounder of a new and unheard-of doctrine. Our teachers do but supply the tools wherewith we work the mine that is within us. Excuses have, therefore, been very unnecessarily offered for Harvey on the score referred to. He may not, it has been said, have read the works of Servetus, Cæsalpinus, and the others from which he has been accused of borrowing without acknowledgment. But Harvey was a highly educated physician, and certainly familiar with everything that had been written on anatomy, from Aristotle and Galen downwards. Why then makes he mention of so few of them in the discussion of his subject? He who reads the Exercises on the Motion of the Heart and Blood will be at no loss for an answer. It was simply because that which he had himself to advance was not in their works. With the exception of the new truth of the pulmonary transit announced by Servetus and made generally known by Columbus, whom Harvey quotes, there is little or nothing on the heart and blood in the writings of his more immediate predecessors that is not in Aristotle, Galen, and Vesalius, or, if not there, that is otherwise than erroneous in fact. But no mind however vigorous, no imagination however fertile, ever worked to purpose that did not borrow

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largely from the intellectual stores of bygone times, as well as from those collected by its own experience and observation. 1 And what says Harvey himself? -reply enough, as it seems, to all cavil on the score of his neglect of predecessors. "I had no purpose

to swell this treatise into a great volume by quoting the names and opinions of anatomists, or to parade the strength of my memory, the extent of my reading, and the amount of my pains; because I profess both to learn and to teach anatomy from dissections, not from books; from the fabric of nature, not from the dicta of philosophers. I would not, indeed, appear to contend with the ancients for any honours that are theirs, and I do not think it seemly to dispute with the moderns, or to enter into controversy with those who have excelled in anatomy and been my teachers. Striving after truth alone, I give all my labour, all my toil, that I may contribute something that shall be agreeable to the good, profitable to the learned and useful in the literary world.” 2

Harvey, as privileged, uses all that was known to his predecessors from the older writers, but arrogates

1 Daubeny, "Lecture on Education at Royal Institution, 1855." 2 "Non ex libris sed ex dissectionibus, non ex placitis philosophorum sed fabrica naturæ discere et docere Anatomen profitear. Tum quod neque è veteribus quemquam debito honore defraudare, neque è posterioribus quemquam irritari æquum censeam aut moliar. Neque cum iis qui in anatomicis antecelluerunt et me docuerunt manus conserere aut dimicari honestum puto. . . sed solam veritatem sector, et omnem, tum operam tum oleum, eò contuli ut aliquid bonis gratum, doctis commodum et rei litterariæ utile in medium proferre possim." (Dedic. ad Exercit. Anat. de motu cordis, &c., pp. 8, 9.)

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