HIS CHARACTER. Ixxix 



Upon the purely Deistic notions of antiquity, however, Harvey 

 unquestionably ingrafted the special faith in Christianity. 

 In connexion Avith the subject of the "term utero- gestation/' 

 he adduces the highest recorded examples as the rule, and 

 speaks of "Christ, our Saviour, of men the most perfect;" 1 

 in the will he farther "most humbly renders his soul to 

 Him that gave it, and to his blessed Lord and Saviour Christ 

 Jesus." 



Harvey was very inquisitive into natural things and natural 

 phenomena. When he accompanied the Earl of Arundel, we 

 have seen that he would still be wandering in the woods, 

 making observations on the strange trees and herbs, and 

 minerals he encountered. His industry in collecting facts 

 was unwearied, and the accuracy with which he himself ob- 

 served appears in every page of his writings ; though we 

 sometimes meet him amiably credulous in regard to the obser- 

 vations of others, as in that instance where he suffers himself 

 to be imposed upon by the traveller's tale of the " Genus 

 humauum caudatum" the race of the human kind with tails. 2 

 Harvey was the first English comparative anatomist; in other 

 words, he was the first physiologist England produced whom 

 superiority of natural endowment led to perceive the rela- 

 tions between the meanest and the highest of created things, 

 and who made the simplicity of structure and of function in the 

 one, a means of explaining the complexity of structure and 

 of function in the other. " Had anatomists," he says, "only 

 been as conversant with the dissection of the lower animals 

 as they are with that of the human body, many matters that 

 have hitherto kept them in a perplexity of doubt would, in 

 my opinion, have met them freed from every kind of difficulty." 

 (On the Heart, p. 35.) Harvey makes frequent and most 

 effectual use of his knowledge of comparative anatomy in his 

 earlier work ; and if the reader will turn to the one on 



1 On Generation, p. 529. 2 Ib. p. 182. 



