30 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH 



which are too far ahead of their contemporaries to be 

 appreciated. The same event happened to Newton's 

 Principia; as Sir William Petty remarks, 'I have not 

 met with one man that put an extraordinary value on 

 the book.' 



Among Englishmen, Primrose alone, brought up 

 among the strictest sect of the Galenists, and at the 

 time not a Fellow wrote a criticism from the old 

 standpoint (1632), and remained unconvinced twelve 

 years later, as his controversy with Regius shows. 

 And only one special treatise in favour of the circula- 

 tion was written in England that of Sir George Ent, 

 a pupil and friend of Harvey, who wrote (1641) specially 

 against Parisanus, a Venetian, a foeman quite unworthy 

 of his quill. In the universities the new doctrine 

 rapidly gained acceptance in Cambridge through the 

 influence of Glisson, while in part to Harvey's work 

 and influence may be attributed that only too brief but 

 golden renaissance of science at Oxford. A little inci- 

 dent mentioned in the autobiographical notes of the 

 celebrated Wallis shows how the subject was taken up 

 quite early in the universities : ' And I took into it the 

 speculative part of physick and anatomy as parts of 

 natural philosophy, and, as Dr. Glisson has since told 

 me, I was the first of his sons who (in a public disputa- 

 tion) maintained the circulation of the blood, which was 

 then a new doctrine, though I had no design of 

 practising physick.' This was in the early 'thirties'. 

 But the older views were very hard to displace, and 

 as late as 1651 we find such intelligent members of 

 the ' invisible college ' as Boyle and Petty carrying 

 out experiments together in Ireland to satisfy them- 

 selves as to the truth of the circulation of the blood. 



It took much longer for the new views to reach the 



