Ixxii THE LIFE OF HARVEY. 



it is as if heat were rather enkindled within the foetus [at 

 birth] than repressed by the influence of the air." 1 



Had William Harvey possessed this idea in his earlier 

 years, and pursued it as he did 'that of the blood never 

 moving in the veins but in one recurrent course, he would 

 at least have prepared the way for another grand discovery 

 in physiology : demonstrating the erroneousness of the current 

 physiological notions on the use of the lungs, he would have led 

 the van in the investigation of their proper office ; and, had 

 everything else permitted, he might even have anticipated 

 Joseph Black in explaining the source of animal heat. But 

 this was an impossibility at the time : chemistry, in Harvey's 

 day, mostly in the hands of adepts and charlatans, transmuters 

 of the base metals, and searchers after the philosopher's stone 

 and the elixir of life, could have no attractions for the clear in- 

 tellect of the demonstrator of the circulation of the blood. No 

 wonder, therefore, that Harvey " did not care for chymistrey," 

 or that " he was wont to speak against the chymists" (Aubrey, 

 1. c. p. 385) ; this anecdote is but another proof of Harvey's 

 sagacity. Harvey then could only show himself in advance of 

 his age by questioning its opinions on the office of the lungs as 

 he does; the state of chemical science in the middle of the 17th 

 century did not admit of his doing more. Harvey, however, 

 well knew the vivifying force of heat : he saw it the immediate 

 indispensable agent in the reproduction of a living sentient 

 being, as it is probably employed by the Creator as main- 

 spring in the elaborate mechanism of the automatic animal 

 body. 



The short piece on the ANATOMY of THOMAS PARR, is in- 

 teresting in itself; and in giving us a glimpse of Harvey's 

 style of pathological reasoning, confirms us in our faith in the 

 1 On Generation, p. 530. 



