PREFACE.

It is now more than thirty years since, at the instance of my associates of the Sydenham Society, I undertook to edit an English version of the works of Harvey, and to add a Notice of the Life of the immortal discoverer of the Circulation of the Blood. My Sketch, however, was only from sources most readily accessible to me, and nowise critical— principally from the one comprised in the Biographia Britannica, and that by Dr. Lawrence, which prefaces the fine edition of Harvey's works in Latin, edited by Dr. Mark Akenside, for the College of Physicians, and published in the year 1766. Though favourably received by my professional brethren, the Life I compiled was unavoidably much less complete than I had thought to make it; for, soon after undertaking my task of Editor, I became immersed in the coil of general medical practice, which leaves little leisure for literary labour.

Yet have I always hoped that, living long enough, and escaping from more active professional duties, I might one day be enabled to accomplish my purpose of writing a Life of Harvey, of ampler scope than the earlier sketch, and, by reference to the

writings of the great Anatomists of the period of the Renaissance especially, to trace the gradual approximation to truer interpretations of function through better apprehensions of structure, until Physiology for the first time, and in the highest sense of the word, received its birth from the genius of Harvey, and the foundations of rational medicine were laid.

If I had cherished a desire of the kind for half a lifetime, the propriety of bringing it to fruition had been growing on me for the last year or two. The persistent attempts of continental writers, Italians especially, to detract from the honour of Harvey, and ascribe his discovery to others; as well as the shortcomings of the half-hearted and, through inadequate information, perfunctory apologies for the great Anatomist which have appeared among ourselves, seemed to me, indeed, to make the work, not only a matter of propriety, but one of necessity.

Honoured and revered as is the memory of Harvey, by the most learned of our brethren, both at home and abroad, it is not a little extraordinary that we have no special detached Life of him in our literature. A work dedicated expressly to a History of the Circulation of the Blood, and the Life of one of the greatest of Englishmen, its discoverer, appears, however, to have been somewhat generally expected as a fitting accompaniment of the Tercentenary birthday of our great Anatomist, and among my friends who were aware of the bent of my studies for some time past, to have been looked for at my hands. And my work, as

anticipated, had been all but completed by the close of the past year, when serious illness overtook me, and incapacitated me from seeing it through the press.

The interval that has elapsed between the date of April 1st, and that of the actual publication which had been contemplated, will, I trust, be found to have proved no detriment to the work. I have, in fact, mainly to regret my inability to revisit the great libraries of the British Museum and Royal College of Surgeons, which I had used so freely, for the final revision and verification of the passages from the works of the writers I have quoted.

I am admonished by a highly competent authority that I have fallen short of what I might have said on the function of the Lymphatic system, which I take the opportunity of amending here. In so far as the fluid secreted and conveyed by the Lymphatics is of less specific gravity than venous blood, in so far must the blood of the veins be more dense than that of the arteries, and so have become fitted to absorb from the plasma-bathed tissues through which they run. But I had no intention of saying that this was all the duty performed by the great Lymphatic system. All recent researches seem to point to it as influential in the hæmapoesis; but how and in what way it is so seems to me to remain an enigma. I only referred to so much of the function as I conceived to bear on the question I had in hand, viz., the way in which the veins acquired their signal absorbent powers.

A word as to the Portraits we have of Harvey. Their number and the places where they are preserved

manifest the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries. The best known, perhaps, is the one ascribed to Cornelius Jansen, which adorns the library of the Royal College of Physicians. There is another in the library of the Royal Society by De Reyn, which has been engraved by Scriven in Knight's "Gallery of Portraits." The picture in our National Portrait Gallery is a poor production; it has been engraved by Houbraken and Gaywood, and was once the property of Dr. Mead. I have seen another, which belonged to Dr. Bright, and is still in the possession of his son, which I believe to have been painted nearly at the same period as the one in, the College of Physicians.

All of these portraits, nevertheless, are undoubtedly of the same man, and correspond in most respects with the description left us of Harvey by his contemporary Aubrey.

On panels over the fireplace in the dining-room of the Manor House of Rolls Park, near Chigwell, in Essex, which I have visited, are portraits of Thomas Harvey, the Kentish yeoman, and his seven sons, the one on the upper left-hand file being inscribed with the name of William Harvey; but in this, the portrait of a man in the very prime of life, only a lively imagination can perceive any likeness to the pictures we have of Harvey in riper years, when he had become famous. The portrait of the sire is certainly of the time when he lived, and bears a certain resemblance to some of the likenesses we have of his most distinguished son. But the portraits of all the

seven sons have so marked a similarity to one another, being all of them of men about forty years of age, and apparently by the same hand, that I am much inclined to look on them as apocryphal, or as reproductions of portraits that have disappeared.

Other portraits of members of the Harvey family, however, graced the walls of Rolls Park while it was still the residence of the successive descendants of Eliab Harvey, who purchased half the manor in the year 1655. The present owner of the estate (Captain Richard Lloyd, one of the lineal representatives of the family through his mother, a daughter of the distinguished Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey) informs me that he removed as many as thirty family portraits, and among them one of the Doctor, from Rolls Park to his present residence, Aston Hall, Oswestry, Salop. This portrait is not noticed in the list which I owe to my friend Mr. Scharf, Keeper of the National Portrait Gallery; and there is yet another not included in this list, the last that could have been made of the illustrious Discoverer-the bust, namely, over the memorial tablet in Hempstead Church.

This I have not met with in any engraving, and the same cause which delayed the appearance of my work incapacitated me from accomplishing the pilgrimage to the burial-place of the Harvey family. My friend, Dr. Richardson, however, lately visited Harvey's final resting-place, in company with Mr. Thomas Woolner, R.A., the great sculptor, on whose unquestionable authority he informs me that the bust on the monument is undoubtedly modelled from a mask taken after