Motion of the Heart and Blood 87 



heat and spirits, and all else requisite to its preservation 

 that, by returning, it should be renovated and restored. 



We frequently see how the extremities are chilled by 

 the external cold, how the nose and cheeks and hands 

 look blue, and how the blood, stagnating in them as in 

 the pendent or lower parts of a corpse, becomes of a 

 dusky hue ; the limbs at the same time getting torpid, 

 so that they can scarcely be moved, and seem almost 

 to have lost their vitality. Now they can by no means 

 be so effectually, and especially so speedily restored 

 to heat and colour and life, as by a new afflux and 

 appulsion of heat from its source. But how can parts 

 attract in which the heat and life are almost extinct ? 

 Or how should they whose passages are filled with 

 condensed and frigid blood, admit fresh aliment 

 renovated blood unless they had first got rid of their 

 old contents ? Unless the heart were truly that fountain 

 where life and heat are restored to the refrigerated fluid, 

 and whence new blood, warm, imbued with spirits, 

 being sent out by the arteries, that which has become 

 cooled and effete is forced on, and all the particles 

 recover their heat which was failing, and their vital 

 stimulus well-nigh exhausted. 



Hence it is that if the heart be unaffected, life and 

 health may be restored to almost all the other parts 

 of the body ; but the heart being chilled, or smitten 

 with any serious disease, it seems matter of necessity 

 that the whole animal fabric should suffer and fall into 

 decay. When the source is corrupted, there is nothing, 

 as Aristotle says, 1 which can be of service either to it or 

 aught that depends on it. And hence, by the way, it 

 may perchance be wherefore grief, and love, and envy, 

 and anxiety, and all affections of the mind of a similar 

 kind are accompanied with emaciation and decay, or 

 with cacochemy and crudity, which engender all manner 

 of diseases and consume the body of man. For every 

 affection of the mind that is attended with either pain 



1 De Part. Animal, iii. 



