. 



too THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Men wasted their time and energies in discussing whether a spirit 

 could live in a vacuum, and whether, in that case, the vacuum would 

 be complete ; and whether Adam and Eve, not being born in the 

 natural manner, possessed the umbilical mark. They theorized con- 

 cerning the nature or essence of vital principles and other mysterious 

 entities, and heaped hypothesis on hypothesis, careless of their founda- 

 tions. Van Helmont, who is immortalized by the discovery of the 

 gases, adopted as an established fact a theory which he founded on 

 the hypothetical " archseus " or entity of Paracelsus. The archseus 

 beiDg an immaterial force or spiritual agent, Van Helmont believed 

 that each member of the body had its own particular archseus, subor- 

 dinate to the central or principal archseus, which he localized in the 

 stomach ; and, as he found that nauseating medicines impaired mental 

 vigor, he assigned to the stomach the seat of the intellect also. Thus, 

 although he made great discoveries in chemistry, his physiology was 

 wildly imaginary and unwarrantably assumptive, and detracts from 

 the fame which his valuable researches in chemistry conferred upon 

 him. 



The matter-of-fact Vesalius, too, who had dared to fail in seeing 

 the openings through the septum of the heart, which Galen had 

 declared to exist, did not dream of disputing the theory of that 

 authority concerning the distribution of the blood, which required 

 that the blood from the two ventricles should intermingle, and there- 

 fore imagined that it distilled through the pores of the unbroken and 

 impermeable partition ; and, contrary to what seems to have been his 

 general temper, he steadily denied the existence of valves in the veins, 

 which had been observed by others, although he might have verified 

 their statements had he been in this instance open to conviction. Ser- 

 vetus, also, the victim of Calvin, who burnt him and his works together at 

 Geneva, when he had discovered the pulmonary circulation, and almost 

 grasped the great secret afterward found out by Harvey the complete 

 circulation of the blood instead of proceeding with the investigation, 

 assumed all other errors except the one he had disproved, and describes 

 how the air passes from the nose into the ventricles of the brain, and 

 speculates how the devil takes the same route to the soul. The spirit 

 of the age continued eminently unpractical, and men took interest 

 in facts only as they could be bent to the support of preconceived 

 theories, " spinning," as Lord Bacon says, " like the spider, the thread 

 of speculative doctrine from within themselves," and regarding the 

 perfection and symmetry of their production, rather than its truth and 

 certainty. Abstract from Fortnightly Review. 



