hat
was the most that he seems to have known anything about, or that was
accessible to him at that day. And so it came about, that, although he
examined the course of the blood in many of the lower animals--watched
the pulsation of the heart in shrimps, and animals of that kind--he
never could put the final coping-stone on his edifice. He did not know
to the day of his death, although quite clear about the fact that
the arteries and the veins do communicate, how it is that they
communicate--how it was that the blood of the arteries passed into the
veins. One is grieved to think that the grand old man should have gone
down to his tomb without the vast satisfaction it would have given to
him to see what the Italian naturalist Malpighi showed only seven years
later, in 1664, when he demonstrated, in a living frog, the actual
passage of the blood from the ultimate ramifications of the arteries
into the veins. But that absolute ocular demonstration of the truth of
the views he had maintained throughout his life it was not granted to
Harvey to see. What he did experience was this: that on the publication
of his doctrines, they were met with the greatest possible opposition;
and I have no doubt savage things were uttered in those old
controversies, and that a great many people said that these new-fangled
doctrines, reducing living processes to mere mechanism, would sap the
foundations of religion and morality. I do not know for certain that
they did, but they said things very like it. The first point was to
show that Harvey's views were absolutely untrue; and not being able to
succeed in that, opponents said they were not new; and not being able to
succeed in that, that they didn't matter. That is the usual course with
all new discoveries. But Harvey troubled himself very little about these
things. He remained perfectly quiet; for although reputed a hot-tempered
man, he never would have anything to do with controversy if he could
help it; and he only replied to one of his antagonists after twenty
years' interval, and then in the most charming spirit of candour and
moderation. But he had the great satisfaction of living to see his
doctrine accepted upon all sides. At the time of his death, there
was not an anatomical school in Europe in which the doctrine of the
circulation of the blood was not taught in the way in which Harvey had
laid it down. In that respect he had a happiness which is granted to
very few men.

I have said