as a first step in the prosecution of all
the branches of science, especially of medicine; and the skill with
which Harvey avails himself of the scholastic form of reasoning in his
great work on the Circulation, with the elegant Latin style of all his
writings, particularly of his latest work on the Generation of Animals,
affords a sufficient proof of his diligence in the prosecution of these
preliminary studies during the next four years which he spent at
Cambridge. The two next were occupied in visiting the principal cities
and seminaries of the Continent. He then prepared to address himself to
those investigations to which the rest of his life was devoted; and the
scene of his introduction to them could not have been better chosen than
at the University of Padua, where he became a student in his
twenty-second year.

The ancient physicians gathered what they knew of anatomy from
inaccurate dissections of the lower animals, and the slender knowledge
thus acquired, however inadequate to unfold the complicated functions of
the human frame, was abundantly sufficient as a basis for conjecture, of
which they took full advantage. With them everything became easy to
explain, precisely because nothing was understood; and the nature and
treatment of disease, the great object of medicine, and its subsidiary
sciences, was hardily abandoned to the conduct of the imagination, and
sought for literally among the stars. Nevertheless, so firmly was their
authority established, that even down to the close of the sixteenth
century the naturalists of Europe still continued to derive all their
physiology, and the greater part of their anatomy and medicine, from the
works of Aristotle and Galen, read not in the original Greek, but
re-translated into Latin from the interpolated versions of the Arabian
physicians. The opinions entertained by these dictators in the republic
of letters, and consequently by their submissive followers, with regard
to the structure and functions of the organs concerned in the
circulation, were particularly fanciful and confused; so much so that it
would be no easy task to give an intelligible account of them that would
not be tedious from its length. It will be enough to say, that a
scarcely more oppressive mass of mischievous error was cleared away from
the science of astronomy by the discovery of Newton, than that from
which physiology was disencumbered by the discovery of Harvey.

But though the work was comp