456 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



I sought to discover the motions and uses of the heart from actual inspec- 

 tion and not from the writings of others; at length, and by using greater and 

 daily diligence and investigaion, making frequent inspection of many and various 

 animals, and collating numerous observations, I thought I had attained to the 

 truth, etc. 



He says he has gone to work, " in order that what is false may be 

 set right by dissection, multiplied experience and accurate observation." 

 No short cuts, no shirking of trouble : no royal road to physiology. He 

 goes on : 



Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences 

 all men. Still ' ' the die is cast, ' ' and my trust is in my love of truth and in 

 the candor of cultivated minds. Harvey was a gentleman. 



Harvey demonstrated to any one who wished to see; to Hoffman 

 at Nuremberg, to Vesling at Padua, to King Charles I., to whom he 

 showed much : the king went with his physician to see a patient, a son 

 of a Lord Montgomery, whose heart was congenitally exposed (ectopia 

 cordis). Harvey dedicated his "De Motu" to the king. 



Harvey did .not apparently think of injecting the vascular system 

 with some kind of colored liquid, as was done shortly after his death 

 by several observers, notably by Euyseh of Amsterdam. But even had 

 he so filled the vessels and therefore the capillaries, he could not, in 

 the absence of all histological technique, have seen them in the opaque 

 tissues. Harvey made the capillaries a logical necessity, Malpighi 

 made them a histological certainty. But Harvey did much more than 

 discover the mechanism of the circulation. He attempted with all the 

 assiduity of his nature to discover the mechanism of reproduction and 

 the course of development of the embryo. 



Inexorably hampered by having no microscope wherewith to explore 

 the ultravisible, Harvey nevertheless reached conclusions which have 

 stood the test of time. He insisted that that small white speck on the 

 surface of the yolk (the cicatricula) was the precursor of the chick, 

 that the whole future animal came from a fertilized germ, and that 

 every living being came from an egg (ovum). Such were by no means 

 the views held by the majority of naturalists in his day; he was once 

 more ahead of his time. Not until 1827, by von Baer, was the full 

 truth of these things substantiated. 



Harvey when Warden of Merton College, Oxford, where he was for 

 two years when Oxford held out for Charles, associated himself with a 

 Dr. Bathurst in experiments on development. Dr. Bathurst had hens 

 laying eggs in bis rooms in college, so that the embryo chick might be 

 studied at any stage of its evolution. 



Harvey furthermore wrote a treatise on respiration and one on 

 insects; these, along with notes of post-mortem examinations (patholog- 

 ical anatomy), were all destroyed when his rooms in Whitehall were 

 ransacked by the soldiers of the Parliament in 1642, an indelible stain 



