HIS WORKS. Ixxiii 



great physiologist as a practitioner of medicine. If knoAvledge 

 will not help, how should the want of it avail ? 



The LETTERS of Great men generally serve to make us more 

 intimately acquainted with them than without such aid. we 

 could have become. This is more especially the case as respects 

 the letters that are written in the ease and confidence of 

 private friendship. It is greatly to be regretted that so few 

 of the letters of this description that flowed from the pen of 

 Harvey should have come down to us. Those addressed to 

 Giovanni Nardi, however, show us what an affectionate and 

 elegant mind our Harvey possessed; how mindful he always 

 appears of former kindnesses to himself and to those that were 

 near to him ; how anxious that he should be cherished in the 

 memory of his friends, even as he cherishes them in his own ! 



The other letters we possess are mostly upon professional 

 physiological topics; though the one addressed from Nurem- 

 berg to Caspar Hofmann may, perhaps, be held an exception; 

 for in this letter the manly and candid character of Harvey 

 displays itself conspicuously. In his own city he challenges 

 the Nuremberg professor to the proof. " If you would see 

 with your o.vn eyes the things I assert of the circulation, I 

 promise to show them to you with the opportunity afforded 

 me." We have seen that Harvey accompanied the Earl of 

 Arundel in his extraordinary embassy to the Emperor, in 

 1636, and may probably have been one of the party of which 

 three members were barbarously murdered on their way, from 

 Nuremberg to Ratisbon, as Crowne 1 informs us. Hence the 

 solicitude which Hollar, the artist, who also accompanied the 

 ambassador, informed Aubrey the Earl of Arundel expressed 

 for his physician's safety : "For he would still be making of ex- 

 cursions into the woods, making observations of strange trees, 

 plants, earths, &c., and sometimes like to be lost ; so that my 

 1 A True Relation, &c., p. 46. 



