6o2 



NA TURE 



[October 19, 189;; 



deavours for the advancement of the Society, according to the 

 example of those benefactors ; and with an exhortation to the 

 Fellows and members of the said College to search and study 

 out the Secrets of Nature by way of experiment ; and also for 

 the honour of the profession to continue in mutual love and 

 affection among themselves, without which neither the dignity 

 of the College can be preserved, nor yet particular men receive 

 that benefit by their admission into the College which they 

 might expect ; ever remembering that ' Concordia res parvie 

 crcscunt, discordia magna dilabunlur.' " 



I. Concerning the originality of that immortal discovery, 

 which places Harvey in the limited class represented by 

 Aristotle and Archimedes, Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin, 

 it is sufficient to bear in mind the following considerations : — 



1st. If Harvey's doctrine of the circulation was not new, why 

 was it opposed by men in the position of Riolanus and Hoflfmann, 

 and welcomed as a discovery by Bartolinus and Schlegel and 

 Descartes? Surely his contemporaries were better judges of 

 the novelty of his views than we are ! 



2nd. Admitting that Servetus and Columbus taught the 

 doctrine of the lesser circulation, we need but a moment's 

 thought to convince us that no complete knowledge of this part 

 of the subject was possible until the existence of a systemic circu- 

 lation was established ; for the one is physically impossible 

 without the other. 



3rd. The title of Harvey's great work is not, as it is some- 

 times quoted, "The Circulation of the Blood," but " De Main 

 Cordis et Sanguinis." He first showed that the flesh, or 

 parenchyma, of the heart is true muscle, that the heart is not 

 a passive chamber receiving the blood, but a contractile organ 

 expelling it. Until the motive power of the heart was un- 

 derstood there coii/d be no true theory of the circulation. 



The fact is, that when we know the true solutionofa problem, 

 it is easy to see or think we see it in any discussion which 

 preceded the discovery ; for there is only a limited number of 

 answers to most questions, and therefore true as well as false 

 solutions are almost sure to have been proposed. 



In the writings of Columbus, Servetus, and Csesalpinus, 

 phrases occur which sometimes seem as if the writers were 

 going to state the truth that Harvey first asserted. 



But it would be as reasonable to infer, from such passages, 

 that the circulation of the blood was then known, as from the 

 lines that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Brutus : 



" As dear to me as are the ruddy drops 

 That visit my sad heart." 



As Paley well said, /te only discovers who proves. To hit 

 upon a true conjecture here and there amid a crowd of untrue, 

 and leave it again without appreciation of its importance, is 

 the sign, not of intelligence, but of frivolity. We are told that 

 of the seven wise men of Greece, one (I believe it was Thales) 

 taught that the sun did not go round the earth, but the earth 

 round the sun, and hence it has been said that Thales antici- 

 pated Copernicus — a flagrant example of the fallacy in question. 

 A crowd of idle philosophers talking all day long about all 

 things in heaven and earth, must .sometimes have hit on a true 

 opinion, if only by accident, but Thales, or whoever broached 

 the heliocentric dogma, had no reason for his belief, and showed 

 himself not more but less reasonable than his companions. The 

 crude theories and gross absurdities of phrenology are not in 

 the least justified, or even excused, by our present knowledge 

 of cerebral localisation ; nor do the baseless speculations of 

 Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin entitle them to be regarded 

 as the forerunners of Erasmus Darwin's illustrious grandson. 

 Cuvier was perfectly right in his controversy with Geoffroy St. 

 Hilaire ; the weight of evidence was undoubtedly on his side. 

 Up to 1859 impartial and competent men were bound to dis- 

 believe in evolution ; after that date, or at least so soon as the 

 facts and arguments of Darwin and Wallace had been published, 

 they were equally bound to believe in it. He discovers who 

 proves, and by this test Harvey is the sole and absolute dis- 

 coverer of the movements of the heart and of the blood. 



Concerning the methods used by Harvey they were various, 

 and his discovery, like most great advances in knowledge, was 

 not achieved by one of the happy accidents which figure in 

 story books, or by the single crucial, and never-in-after-ages- 

 except-under-license-and-special-certificite-to-be-repeated, ex- 

 periment which some members of a certain Royal Commission 

 supposed to be the only kind of experiment needed in scientific 

 inquiries. 



NO. I 25 I, VOL, 48] 



A perusal of Harvey's own statements makes it 'plain, it 

 seems to me, that having gained his knowledge of the anatomy 

 of the heart and of the current hypotheses of its function from 

 his Ilali.in masters, he reasoned thus : — First, that the cardiac 

 valves must be intended for such physiological service as their 

 construction would indicate. He believed that every part of 

 this human microcosm has a meaning ; that it is by no chance 

 result of bUnd forces that an organ is adapted to its end. This 

 great postulate is necessary for scientific progress. If the 

 difiiculties of physiology, whether normal or morbid, seem so- 

 intricate and insuperable that we are tempted to doubt whether 

 the riddle after all has an answer, we must again and again fall- 

 back on the faith of Harvey and of Newton, of Boyle and of 

 Linna-us. The great doctrine of natural selection has thrown 

 wonderful light upon the methods by which the results that we- 

 see have been reached, but has not impaired the excellence of 

 those results nor their evidence of beneficent design. 



Belief then that the body and all its parts is a machine con- 

 structed for certain uses, that everything in Nature has a reason 

 and an end — this was Harvey's postulate when he argued out 

 the functions of the heart and vessels from their anatomical 

 construction. 



Harvey's second method was that of actual experiment. Oo 

 this point he leaves us in no doubt. His second chapter is 

 headed, " Exviv07-tim disscctione qtialis sit cordis tiiotus," and 

 in the introductory chapter which precedes this, he says : — 



"Tandem majori indies et disquisitione et diligentia usus, 

 multa frequenter et varia animalia viva introspiciendo, multis- 

 observationibus collatiset rem attigisse et ex hoc labyrintho me 

 exiricatum evasissc, simulquemotum etusum cordis et arteriarum 

 quae desiderabam compena habuere me existimabam." 



Many of his vivisections were not strictly .speaking experi- 

 ments, but observations— inspection of the living heart and 

 arteries — others were experiments in the modern and restricted 

 use of the word. These were Harvey's methods, as they must 

 be the methods of all natural science. First, observation ; next,, 

 reflection ; then experiment. " Don't think ; try," was Hunter's 

 advice to Jenner ; an advice that is often needed by an acute 

 inquiring genius like his ; still more often by s'neer idleness, 

 that will never bring its fancies to the test of fact.' 



Experiments without hypotheses are often fruitless, but 

 hypotheses which are never brought to the test of experiment 

 are positively mischievous. 



How far have the Fellows of this College obeyed Harvey's 

 precept and followed his example in " searching out the secrets- 

 of nature by way of experiment." We must, I fear, confess 

 that after the brilliant period of the seventeenth century (in some 

 respects the greatest of our history and certainly the most fruit- 

 ful in great men) experimental science made slow and uncertain 

 progress, so that between Harvey and Newton, Hook and Grew, 

 Mayow and Boyle on the one hand, and Cavendish, Black and 

 Priestley, Hunter and Hewson on the other, there was a long 

 period of stagnation or even retrogression. Hypotheses and 

 dogmas, misapplied mathematics, imperfect chemistry, and an 

 afi^ected literary style (made more conventional by the practice 

 of writing in a foreign language better fitted for rhetoric than 

 science) contributed to make the eighteenth century compara- 

 tively barren, in so far as science generally, and physiology and 

 medicine in particular, are concerned. 



The "way of experiment," in the strict sense of the word, 

 has been hitherto most successfully applied to normal physiology. 

 The successors of Harvey were not Sydenham, Radcliffe, 

 Arbuthnot, Garth, Meade, Freind and Heberden, but Lower, 

 Mayow, Hales, Vierordt, Ludwig and Chauveau. Pathology as 

 an experimental science is still in its infancy, but the infancy is 

 that of Hercules, and bids fair to strangle such dire pests as 

 anthrax, cholera, tetanus and hydrophobia. 



Before quitting this part of my subject, I would fain correct a 

 popular misconception that Harvey was a neglected genius-^ 

 that his contemporaries, his professional brethren, and in parti- 

 cular this ancient College, refused to listen to his new notions, 

 ridiculed his discoveries, and spoiled his practice. Whether 

 as his fame grew his practice diminished, we cannot tell. If 

 so, his patients were the losers. What Harvey and every 

 honest man cares for, is not popular applause, but the con- 

 fidence and esteem ol his comrades ; and this he deserved and 

 received. It was as lecturer at this College that he propounded 



1 Ea autem vera esse vel falsa. Sensus nos facere debet certiores, non 

 Ratio; avToi/zia non mentis iigitatio. Second Epistle to Riolanus, p. 133- 

 (College edition). 



