e scientific authorities for the
moment of new discoveries was so common, as to be almost the rule in
the history of progress in science.

This is so different from what is ordinarily supposed to be the calm
course of scientific evolution, that it will need a series of
illustrative cases to support it. In recent years, however, the
cultivation of the history of science has been more ardent than in the
past, and the result has been that many more know of this curious
anomaly and paradox in scientific history than was the case a few
years ago, and it is comparatively easy to obtain the material to
demonstrate it. One of the most striking instances is that of Harvey.

Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, at a time and under
circumstances that would surely lead us to expect its immediate
acceptance and the hailing of him as a great original thinker in
science. He first expounded it to his class, very probably in 1616,
which will be remembered as the year of Shakespeare's death. The glory
of the great Elizabethan era in England was not yet passed. Men's
minds had been opened to great advances in every department of thought
during the preceding century, by the Renaissance movement and the New
Learning in England. Probably no greater group of original thinkers
has ever existed than were alive in England during the preceding
twenty-five years. Four years after Harvey had sufficiently elaborated
his ideas on the circulation to present them to his class, and the
very year after he wrote his treatise on the {398} subject, though he
dared not publish it as yet, Lord Bacon published his Novum Organum,
in which he advocated the use in science of the very principles of
induction on which Harvey's great discovery was founded.

What happened is interesting for our purpose. Harvey was so well
acquainted with the intolerant temper of men as regards new
discoveries, that he hesitated to publish his book on the subject
until men had been prepared for it, by his ideas gradually filtering
out among the medical profession through the members of his class. He
waited nearly fifteen years after his first formal lesson on the
subject, before he dared to commit it to print. Shakespeare had made
Brutus say to Portia:

"You are my true and honorable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart;"

but men were not yet ready to accept the great principle of the blood
movement. There seems to be good authori