time: chemistry, in Harvey's day, mostly in the hands of adepts and charlatans, transmuters of metals, searchers after the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life, could have no attraction for the clear intellect of the demonstrator of the circulation of the blood. No wonder, therefore, that Harvey "did not care for chymistrey," or that "he was wont to speak against the chymists." What Aubrey says on this head (1. c. p. 385) is but another proof of Harvey's sagacity. Harvey could show himself in advance of his age by questioning its opinions on the office of the lungs; but the state of chemical science in the middle of the seventeenth century did not admit of his doing more. He, however, well knew the vivifying force of heat: he saw it as the immediate agent in the production of living sentient beings, and the mainspring in the mechanism of the automatic animal body. If Harvey's work, then, went little way in solving the mystery of Generation, it proved, nevertheless, a great incentive to the prosecution of the subject, parent as it has been of the long array of works and papers that have brought us to the ultimate fact of the penetration of the micropyle of the ovum by the spermatic cell, but leaving us as much in the dark as ever how such a process should be indispensable to the production of a new creature-how two distinct organic germs or cells, detached from the organisms that produced them, each impotent in itself, should yet by their union acquire the power to com mence a series of transformations that end in the development of a being capable of assuming independent conscious existence for a day, for a year, for a hundred years or more! But it was not in the sphere of science only that the work on Generation proved influential. The practice of midwifery and the treatment of uterine diseases was in a terribly backward state when Harvey wrote; so that the appended chapters on Parturition, the Membranes, the Placenta, the Umbilical Cord, and Conception were positive revelations that speedily bore fruit of the most valuable kind. In my Life of Harvey for the Sydenham Society I showed that he must have practised midwifery, and by his superior knowledge found remedies for states that were the despair of the ignorant midwives of the day. Although making no pretensions to rank as a treatise on practical midwifery, Harvey's work "On Generation" might nevertheless be spoken of as the first book on the subject written by an Englishman, so full are its later chapters of new and valuable suggestions. Dr. Aveling' quotes the works of Percival Willughby, a distinguished surgeon of the period, to show in what esteem Harvey was held in this long neglected but most responsible portion of the general medical practitioner's business. "Hee sheweth in the first place," says Willughby, "what to observe and how to deliver a woman labouring in a naturall birth. And in difficult births and abortive births, and 1 "Memorials of Harvey," by J. W. Aveling, M.D. 8vo. Lond., 1875. where the fœtus is dead, hee maketh mention how to perform the work by the child's feet. In his workes he wisheth midwives not to bee too busy at the first approaching labour, by striving to hasten or promote a sudden or quick birth; but willeth them patiently to wait on nature, to observe her ways, and not to disquiet her, for that it is the sole and onely work of nature. Harvey, indeed, shows us plainly that he was partial to this branch of his profession, and meets us here as the practitioner more, perhaps, than in any other part of his writings. The short piece on the "Anatomy of Thomas Parr " is interesting in itself, and, in giving us a glimpse of Harvey's style of pathological reasoning, confirms us in our faith in the great physiologist as a practitioner of medicine. If knowledge will not help, how shall the want of it avail? Whether Harvey believed in the great reputed age of Parr-157 years-it is impossible to say from anything that appears in his report. I imagine that he did not. SECTION XIV. CORRESPONDENCE. THE LACTEAL VESSELS. ABSORPTION OF THE CHYLE. THE letters of great men generally serve to make us more intimately acquainted with them than without such aid we could have become. This is more especially the case as regards letters written in the ease and confidence of private friendship. It is greatly to be regretted that so few of this description should have come down to us, and that not one of them is in English; for the letter to Dorchester, published by Aveling, is not to a friend, but to one in authority. Those addressed to Giovanni Nardi, however, show us what an affectionate and elegant mind Harvey possessed; how mindful he appears of former kindnesses to himself and to those that were near to him; how anxious that he should be cherished in the memory of his friends, even as he cherishes them in his own! The other letters we possess are mostly upon physiological topics; though the one addressed from Nuremberg to Caspar Hoffmann may, perhaps, be held an exception; for in this letter the manly and independent character of Harvey displays itself conspicuously. In the very city the home of the Nuremberg professor, he challenges him to the proof. "If you would see with your own eyes the things I assert of the circulation, I promise to show them to you with the opportunity afforded me;" and we have seen that Harvey had the occasion he craved, when he accompanied the Earl of Arundel in his embassy extraordinary to the Emperor in 1636, and may have been one of the party of which three members were barbarously murdered on their way from Nuremberg to Ratisbon, as Crowne1 informs us. Hence the solicitude which Hollar, the artist, who also accompanied the ambassador, informs us the Earl of Arundel expressed for his physician's safety: "For he would still be making of excursions into the woods, making observations of strange trees, plants, earths, &c., and sometimes like to be lost; so that my lord ambassador would be really angry with him, for there was not only danger of wild beasts, but of thieves.' The burden of the long and able letter to Schlegel of Hamburg, is still the Circulation; and the one addressed to Morison, with the two to Horst, treat of the discovery of the receptaculum chyli and thoracic duct by Pecquet. It has been held unworthy of Harvey's greatness that he refused his assent to the special office—not, as often said, to the existence of the lacteal system. But no one can apply himself to all things. Harvey had his own work laid out for him, and the lacteals were not a part of it. Subsidiary to the maintenance of the organism, the lacteals have in truth nothing to do with the mechanism of the circulation: the fluid within them is the pabulum of the blood. Aselli's book on the Lacteal Veins was even published the year before Harvey's "Exercises on the Heart and Blood," and may or may not have been seen by our physiologist before his own work appeared. In any 3 1 "A True Relation," &c., p. 46. 2 Aubrey, op. cit., p. 384. |