304 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Charles I., King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender 

 of the Faith," He was with this king at the battle of Edgehill. 

 Much of his time was occupied in attendance at the royal court, and 

 yet he found opportunity to follow the bent of his genius in anatomi- 

 cal and physiological researches. 



Being wealthy, he remembered the necessities of his profession, and 

 munificently bestowed money in the erection of a fine edifice for the 

 College of Physicians, enriched it with a fine pathological museum and 

 library, and endowed it with funds, wherewith, as a part of the 

 bestowment, an annual oration is delivered for the advancement of 

 medical science. 



But to return to the subject under consideration : methinks I hear 

 you ask, after the foregoing recital of what so many observers have 

 discovered, "What remained for this great man Harvey to discover 

 or explain ? " 



Dr. Rolleston * answers : " Nothing less than the circulation itself. 

 His predecessors had but impinged, and that by guess-work, upon dif- 

 ferent segments of the circle, and then gone off at a tangent into outer 

 darkness, while he worked, and proved, and demonstrated, round its 

 entire periphery." 



True, as Flourens says, when Harvey appeared, everything relative 

 to the circulation of the blood had been indicated or suspected; noth- 

 ing had been established. Servetus knew nothing of the general cir- 

 culation ; Columbus adhered to the Galenic error of the origin of the 

 veins in the liver; Coesalpinus, who perceived the two circidations, 

 and came so near to comprehending them, still held belief in the error 

 of perforations in the ventricular septum; and, lastly, Fabricius who, 

 by-the-way, was not the very first to discover valves in the blood- 

 vessels, but who discovered more of them than any other observer, 

 and wrote more and better than any of his. predecessors Fabricius, I 

 say, did not understand the use of the valves, supposing them to be 

 for the purpose of strengthening the veins and checking the too rapid 

 flux of blood through them. 



The medical historian Sprengel has cunningly remarked that 

 nothing explains Harvey better than "his education at Padua," under 

 the teachings of Fabricius. 



If it was a piece of good fortune for Harvey to enjoy the teachings 

 of Fabricius, it was a happy thing, and a thrice fortunate thing, for 

 the world, that the study of the circulation should have fallen into 

 the hands of a man so avoII fitted to investigate it and to elaborate the 

 true theory of the motion of the heart and blood. 



Before Harvey, it was not known that the heart is the motive 

 power it was presumed to be the lungs ; he it was who demonstrated 

 every step in the progress of the blood in its double circuit, stilled 

 all clamor of disputants, and convinced the world that he was right. 



' " Harveian Oration " for ISYS. 



