ood, setting through the pulmonary artery on the right side, through
the lungs, and back by the pulmonary veins to the left side of the heart
(Fig.3). Such was the capital discovery and demonstration of Realdus
Columbus. He is the man who discovered what is loosely called the
'pulmonary circulation'; and it really is quite absurd, in the face of
the fact, that twenty years afterwards we find Ambrose Pare, the great
French surgeon, ascribing this discovery to him as a matter of common
notoriety, to find that attempts are made to give the credit of it to
other people. So far as I know, this discovery of the course of the
blood through the lungs, which is called the pulmonary circulation, is
the one step in real advance that was made between the time of Galen
and the time of Harvey. And I would beg you to note that the word
"circulation" is improperly employed when it is applied to the course of
the blood through the lungs. The blood from the right side of the
heart, in getting to the left side of the heart, only performs a
half-circle--it does not perform a whole circle--it does not return
to the place from whence it started; and hence the discovery of the
so-called "pulmonary circulation" has nothing whatever to do with that
greater discovery which I shall point out to you by-and-by was made
by Harvey, and which is alone really entitled to the name of the
circulation of the blood.

If anybody wants to understand what Harvey's great desert really was,
I would suggest to him that he devote himself to a course of reading,
which I cannot promise shall be very entertaining, but which, in this
respect at any rate, will be highly instructive--namely, the works of
the anatomists of the latter part of the 16th century and the beginning
of the 17th century. If anybody will take the trouble to do that which
I have thought it my business to do, he will find that the doctrines
respecting the action of the heart and the motion of the blood which
were taught in every university in Europe, whether in Padua or in Paris,
were essentially those put forward by Galen, 'plus' the discovery of the
pulmonary course of the blood which had been made by Realdus Columbus.
In every chair of anatomy and physiology (which studies were not then
separated) in Europe, it was taught that the blood brought to the liver
by the portal vein, and carried out of the liver to the 'vena cava'
by the hepatic vein, is distributed from the right side of the heart,
t