28 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 



Wood speaks of Harvey as the surmiser of the little 

 world, to distinguish him from another Englishman 

 who first went about the greater world. But a greater 

 than both Isaac Newton had grasped the secret of 

 a cosmic circulation, and brooded in silence over the 

 motion of the spheres for more than twenty years before 

 publishing the Principia. Between the writing of the 

 rough sketch in 1842 and the appearance of the Origin 

 of Species seventeen years elapsed ; and from the date 

 of the journal notes, 1836, in which we have the first 

 intimation of Darwin's theory, more than twenty years. 

 In Harvey's case this intellectual reticence, this hesita- 

 tion 'to quit the peaceful haven', as he says, has cost us 

 dear. Only a happy accident gave us the De Genera- 

 tione, and the College can never be too grateful to Sir 

 George Ent for that Christmas visit, 1650, so graphically 

 described, and to which we owe one of the masterpieces 

 of English medicine. How many seventeenth-century 

 treatises we could have spared to have had the Practice 

 of Medicine conformable to his Thesis of the Circulation of 

 the Blood! How instructive his prospective Medical 

 Observations would have been we can gather from the 

 remarkable series of cases scattered through the manu- 

 script notes and his published writings. His ' treatise 

 apart* on Eventilation or Respiration ; the Medical 

 Anatomy ', or Anatomy in its Application to Medicine, 

 as he says, ' I also intend putting to press ' ; the work 

 ' from observations in my possession ' on Organs of 

 Motion in Animals all of these, with the work on 

 Generation in Insects, and others mentioned by Dr. 

 Merrett, 1 the then library keeper, 1667, were probably 

 dispersed when those sons of Belial ransacked his 

 chambers at Whitehall. 



1 Munk, Roll of the College, vol. i, p. 132. 



