DISCOVERY 



103 



in the governorship of Satuminus, and that Satuminus 

 took the census. Incidentally, we may note that Luke 

 does not say that Quirinius took the census, but only 

 that the census was taken while Quirinius was governor. 

 It was different with the " second census " in a.d. 6, 

 which is stated on an inscription to have been carried 

 out, in S\Tia, by Quirinius during his (second) governor- 

 ship. We are justified in concluding that TertuUian 

 was using a good authority when he said that Satuminus 

 took the " first census " in Syria — probably the Roman 

 official hsts. Why, then, does Luke date the Nativity 

 by the name of Quirinius, whose governorship we have 

 seen to have been of an exceptional and ad hoc character, 

 rather than by the name of the ordinary Roman 

 governor of the year ? 



TertuUian uses Roman official information, but 

 Luke's story is caught from the hps of people in the 

 East who remembered the e\'ents of the last decade 

 before our era. WTiat impressed itself on the memorj.' 

 if the contemporary Syrians and Cilicians was not 

 the name of the humdrum civil governor, but that of 

 the soldier who had fought a brilliant campaign on the 

 North-west Frontier, had broken the power of the 

 Pisidian robber chieftains, and freed the great trunk 

 road along which trade, administration, Grseco-Roman 

 culture, and later on Christianity, moved from East to 

 West and West to East. 



It thus appears that the birth of Christ must be dated 

 earlier than 6 B.C. ; and that several convergent lines 

 of argument point to a date 9-7, and probably 8 B.C. 



Note. — In this short account many statements have neces- 

 sarily been made briefly and dogmatically. The reader will 

 get a good idea of the recent growth of knowledge in this subject 

 if he compares the article on Quirinius in Hastings' Dictionary 

 of the Bible (vol. iv, 1902), which was out of date before it was 

 printed, with Ramsay's Was Christ Born in Bethlehem? (1898), 

 and this again with Ramsay's more recent work. The Bearing 

 of Recent Discovery, etc. (1915). chapters xviii to xxi. See 

 also articles by Cheesman ana by Ramsay in the Journal of 

 Roman Studies, 1913-17. On the principle of law and 

 administration exemplified in the journey of Joseph and JIary 

 to Bethlehem see Zulueta in Oxford Studies (Vinogradoff, 1909), 

 and the Russian scholar Rostowzew in his Studien zur Geschichte 

 des romischen Kolonaies, passim. 



The Transfusion of Blood 



By Geoflfrey Keynes, M.D. 



Assistant, Professorial Surgical Cnil, SI. Bartholomew's Hospital 



The idea of the transference of blood from the veins 

 of one person to those of another is one that has always 

 appealed to men's imaginations. It has seemed natural 

 to suppose that the blood, circulating as it does so 



intimately in a man's body, must carry with it some 

 of the characteristics of its owner. Old men have sought 

 to regain their youth by having transfused into them 

 the blood of boys ; soldiers in Fra.nce have refused even 

 to let their lives be saved by having transfused into 

 them the blood of Germans. It is improbable that 

 transfusion in the ordinary sense was tried before the 

 discovery by Harvey in 1616 of the circulation of the 

 blood, but this discovery must have at once suggested 

 the possibility of the direct transference of the blood 

 from vein to vein, and various attempts were made. 

 It is recorded in Sprat's History of the Royal Society, 

 1667, that Sir Christopher Wren was conducting " many 

 new experiments, and chiefly that of transfusing blood, 

 which the Society has prosecuted in sundry instances, 

 that will probably end in extraordinary success." Wren's 

 attempts did, however, end in failure, and it has been 

 left to a later age to achieve the " extraordinary 

 success " that v/as predicted two and a half centuries 

 ago. To-day there are hundreds of men alive who 

 have had the blood of others flowing in their veins, and, 

 indeed, owe their lives to this very fact. But the 

 blood-letting of war had lasted for two years before 

 it became, chiefly through the American doctors 

 in France, a common thing to save men's lives 

 by the direct replacement of the blood which they 

 had lost. 



All the earlier attempts to transfuse blood were done 

 by means of a direct flow of blood from an artery in 

 the forearm of the " blood donor " through a tube into 

 a vein in the arm of the recipient; but it was impossible 

 to know how much blood had passed through the tube, 

 and it was very difficult to prevent the blood from 

 clotting in the tube and so blocking the flow of blood 

 completely. An advance was made in 1892, when a 

 method was devised of transferring blood from one 

 person to another by means of a syringe, which was 

 repeatedly filled from the donor's veins and emptied 

 into those of the recipient. By this means the amount 

 of blood could be measured, but the difficulty caused 

 by the readinesss with which blood clots when it has 

 left the body still remained. The physiology of the 

 clotting of blood is even now, after a great amount of 

 research has been done, an obscure and complicated 

 subject. There is, however, definite knowledge of two of 

 the conditions that are necessary in order that clotting 

 may take place — firstly, contact of the blood with a 

 rough surface which causes certain elements of the blood 

 to disintegrate, and so initiates a chemical process re- 

 sulting in the formation of a clot ; and, secondly, the 

 presence of the element calcium in an active form, since 

 without this the chemical process cannot be completed. 

 The first of these facts was met by the discovery that, 

 if the blood be allowed to come into contact only v.ith 

 a smooth surface of paraffin wax, clotting was prevented 



