HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGY. 19 



was still too strong and several attempts were made to 

 adapt the views of Harvey to the conceptions of Galen. 

 Riolan, the anatomist of the celebrated Paris School, pub- 

 lished his Circulation of the Blood, 1648, in which he 

 tried to show that Galen was correct in the main, but that 

 a little, just a little blood circulated from the arteries 

 through to the veins. It did not, however, circulate 

 through the lungs, but the venous blood reached the arter- 

 ies by passing through the ventricular septum. The lung 

 was to furnish the " vital spirits" as before understood. 



Gradually Harvey's views were adopted, and a new 

 epoch in physiology ushered in. In 1651 Bartholini and 

 Rudbeck announced the discovery of the system of lym- 

 phatics, thus adding another chapter to the circulation, and 

 in 1655 the circulation of blood was finally demonstrated as 

 a fact by Marchetti of the University of Padua, who injected 

 a human cadaver and was thus enabled to follow the trans- 

 lation of the injected fluid through the entire circulation. 



The capstone of the fact of the circulation was finally 

 added by the celebrated physiologist Malpighi, of the Uni- 

 versity of Bologna, 1661. It was he who saw for the first 

 time the circulation through the capillaries. He examined 

 with a " magnifier" the lung tissues of a frog, and to his 

 surprise found the long disputed connections between the 

 arteries and the veins. The discovery and description of 

 the "plexus of capillaries" belong to Malpighi. Soon 

 afterwards with the just-invented microscope, L,eeuwenhoek 

 of Holland, the pioneer in microscopy, discovered the " red 

 globules" circulating in the blood. By this chain of dis- 

 coveries was established one of the most important chapters 

 in physiology the circulation of the blood. 



A long line of illustrious physiologists has contributed its 

 discoveries from that time to the present. The phenomena of 

 respiration were cleared up when Priestly and L,avoisier dis- 

 covered oxygen gas and explained the nature of oxidation. 

 Priestly and L,avoisier were misled, however, in believing 

 that the lung was the seat of the oxidation in the body, 



