Ixxx THE LIFE OF HARVEY. 



Generation (p. 423), and peruse what is said on the subject 

 of 'parts not essential to the being of the individual/ and will 

 then visit the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he 

 will find that the great comparative anatomist and physiologist 

 of the 19th century had a herald in the great comparative 

 anatomist and physiologist of the 17th century. Aubrey 

 mentions particularly Harvey's having " often said that of all 

 the losses he sustained, no grief was so crucifying to him as 

 the loss of his papers (containing notes of his dissections of the 

 frog, toad, and other animals,) which, together with his goods 

 in his lodgings at Whitehall, were plundered at the beginning 

 of the rebellion/' Harvey's store of individual knowledge 

 must have been great ; and he seems never to have flagged in 

 his anxiety to learn more. He made himself master of 

 Oughtred's ' Clavis Mathematica' in his old age, according to 

 Aubrey, who found him " perusing it, and working problems 

 not long before he dyed." 



Aubrey says "he understood Greek and Latin pretty well, 

 but was no critique, and he wrote very bad Latin. The 

 Circuitus Sanguinis was, as I take it, done into Latin by Sir 

 George Ent, as also his booke de Generatione Animalium ; 

 but a little booke, in 12mo, against Riolan (I thinke) wherein 

 he makes out his doctrine clearer, was writ by himself, and that, 

 as I take it, at Oxford." 1 Aubrey, in his gossiping, is doing 

 injustice both to the scholarship and to the candour of Harvey. 

 He heard or knew that Harvey wrote an indifferent hand, and 

 this forsooth he turns into writing indifferent Latin. Every- 

 thing points to the year 1619 as the period when the book De 

 Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (Aubrey does not even know the 

 title !) was written ; Ent, born in 1603, was then a lad of 

 sixteen, and in all likelihood had never heard of Harvey's 

 name; in 1628, when the work came forth at Frankfort, he 

 was but twenty-five, and scarcely emancipated from the leading 



1 Aubrey, 1. c. p. 383. 



