166 PHYSIOLOGY CHAP. 



circulation to Sarpi. Frate Micanzio, Bartholin, Vesling, GJassendi, 

 Walaeus, all hail him as the discoverer. Voss (1685) wrote that 

 the circulation was discovered by Cesalpinus in Italy, Paulo 

 Sarpio Veneto in primis placuit. Vesling communicated to 

 Bartholin that after Sarpi's death he had seen one of his autograph 

 manuscripts in the hands of the Bros. Micanzio, in which the 

 circulation of the blood was described. The famous Dutch 

 physician Walaeus wrote in 1640 : " Paulus Servita Yenetus val- 

 vularum in venis fabricam observavit accuratius ... ex valvularum 

 constitutione aliisque experimentis, sanguinis motuni deduxit 

 egregioque scripto asseruit." Unfortunately, however, the manu- 

 scripts of Sarpi, which were preserved in the Servite Library at 

 Yenice, were destroyed by fire, with a great portion of the convent, 

 in September 1769, only one fragment from a letter cited by 

 Griselini in his book Del genio di Fra Paolo Sarpi (Yenice, 

 1785) remaining, in which Sarpi alludes to matters by him 

 " observed and described in regard to the course of the blood in the 

 vessels of the animal body, and to the structure and function of 

 their valves." 



Y. What, then, was the real merit of William Harvey, the 

 supposed discoverer of the circulation of the blood, after Columbus, 

 after Cesalpirius, after Sarpi ? Assuredly he was not the first to 

 correct Galen's error as to the permeability of the septum, and to 

 affirm that the whole of the blood passes from the right heart to 

 the left through the pulmonary vessels ; this was the discovery of 

 Columbus. Nor was he the first to recognise the presence of 

 arterio-venous anastomoses, the passage of blood through the same, 

 and the centripetal direction of the blood-stream in all the veins : 

 this was the great discovery of Cesalpinus. Nor, again, was he 

 the first to describe the valves of the veins, for they were known 

 to Cannanus, and were accurately described by his pupil Fabricius 

 of Acquapendente ; nor to discover their physiological office in the 

 circulation this was the discovery of Paulus Sarpi. Nevertheless, 

 Harvey's merit was immense ; it consisted in a wider and stronger 

 development of the doctrine communicated by his predecessors, to 

 which he gave a solid basis by means of countless vivisections and 

 ingenious experiments. He committed a grave injustice, however, 

 in claiming the whole merit of the discovery, inasmuch as he 

 ignored the work, and omitted to mention the names, of Cesalpinus 

 and Sarpi. 



After the critical studies of Ceradini and also of Tollin (which 

 coincide in this matter) it would be absurd to pretend that Harvey 

 was not fully acquainted with the works of Cesalpinus, which were 

 published in Yenice in 1593, some five years before Harvey settled 

 at Padua, where he remained for four years (1598-1602) as the 

 pupil of Fabricius of Acquapendente. His silence, when accused 

 of plagiarism by his contemporaries Micanzio, Yesling, Walaeus, 



