HIS WORKS. xli 



until the conclusion is reached, and the inference presents 

 itself as inevitable, namely, that the blood must circle round 

 and round in one determinate course, in the body as in the 

 lungs, incessantly. For Harvey, it must be here observed, left 

 the doctrine of the circulation as an inference or induction only, 

 not as a sensible demonstration. -He adduced certain circum- 

 stances, and quoted various anatomical facts which made a 

 continuous transit of the blood from the arteries into the veins, 

 from the veins into the arteries, a necessary consequence; but 

 he never saw this transit ; his idea of the way in which it 

 was accomplished was even defective; he had no notion of the 

 one order of sanguiferous vessels ending by uninterrupted con- 

 tinuity, or by an intermediate vascular network, in the other 

 order. This was the demonstration of a later day, and of one 

 who first saw the light in the course of the very year when 

 Harvey's work on the Heart was published. 1 



The appearance of Harvey's book on the Motion of the 

 Heart and Blood seems almost immediately to have attracted 

 the attention of all the better intellects among the medical 

 men of Europe. The subject was not one, indeed, greatly 

 calculated to interest the mass of mere practitioners ; had it 

 been a book of receipts it would have had a better chance 

 with them ; but the anatomists and physiologists and scientific 

 physicians would seem at once to have taken it up and can- 

 vassed its merits. The conclusions come to in the work, there 

 can be no question, took the medical world by surprise ; it 

 was not prepared for such a proposition as a ceaseless circular 

 movement of the blood, with the heart for the propelling 

 organ ; for the latter point, be it understood, was even as 

 great a novelty as the former. 



Coming unexpectedly, and differing so widely from the 

 ancient and accepted notions, we cannot wonder that Harvey's 

 views were at first rejected almost universally. The older 



1 Malpighi, born at Crevalcuore, Bologna, the 10th of March, 1628. 



