LETTERS. 



LETTER I. 



To Caspar Hofmann, M.D. Published at Nurenberg, in the 

 ' Spicilegium Illustrium Epistolarum ad Casp. Hqfmannum.' 



YOUR opinion of me_, my most learned Hofmann, so candidly 

 given, and of the motion and circulation of the blood, is ex- 

 tremely gratifying to me; and I rejoice that I have been 

 permitted to see and to converse with a man so learned as 

 yourself, whose friendship I as readily embrace as I cordially 

 return it. But I find that you have been pleased first ela- 

 borately to inculpate me, and then to make me pay the 

 penalty, as having seemed to you " to have impeached and 

 condemned Nature of folly and error ; and to have imputed 

 to her the character of a most clumsy and inefficient artificer, 

 in suffering the blood to become recrudescent, and making it 

 return again and again to the heart in order to be recon- 

 cocted, to grow effete as often in the general system ; thus 

 uselessly spoiling the perfectly-made blood, merely to find her 

 in something to do." But where or when anything of the 

 kind was ever said, or even imagined by me by me, who, on 

 the contrary, have never lost an opportunity of expressing 

 my admiration of the wisdom and aptness and industry of 

 Nature, as you do not say, I am not a little disturbed to 

 find such things charged upon me by a man of sober judg- 

 ment like yourself. In my printed book, I do, indeed, 

 assert that the blood is incessantly moving out from the heart 

 by the arteries to the general system, and returning from this 



