26 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 



states in a manuscript introductory lecture in the College 

 library ' I deliver nothing I have not seen and observed 

 myself he could not add with him, 'I am not a reader 

 of books.' Nearly one hundred references to some 

 twenty authors occur in the manuscript of the thorax, 

 or, as he calls it, the ' parlour ' lecture. 



It is a great pity that we have no contemporary 

 account of the impression on such men as Mayerne or 

 Reid of the new doctrines, for which we have the 

 author's statement that they were taught annually and 

 elaborated. So far as I know there is no reference to 

 show that the lectures had any immediate influence in 

 the profession, or indeed that the subject-matter ever 

 got beyond the circle of the college. We are not with- 

 out a first-hand account by the author of his reception : 

 1 These views as usual pleased some more, others less ; 

 some chid and calumniated me, and laid it to me as 

 a crime that I had dared to depart from the precepts 

 and opinions of all anatomists ; others desired further 

 explanation of the novelties.' 



It is difficult for us to realize the mental attitude of 

 the men who listened year by year as the turn of the 

 1 Parlour Lecture ' came. Their opinions, no less firmly 

 held than is our positive knowledge, did not get much 

 beyond : ' The great dictator Hippocrates puts us in 

 mind of it, Galen has a thousand times inculcated the 

 same, the prince of the Arabian tribe, Avicen, has set 

 his seal unto it.' This expresses their mental state, and 

 such a heresy as a general circulation could scarcely be 

 appreciated ; and in a man of such good parts as Harvey 

 would in pity be condoned, just as we overlook the 

 mild intellectual vagaries of our friends. 



Bootless to ask, impossible to answer, is the question 

 why Harvey delayed for twelve years the publication 



