134 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



England when he was about twenty-four years of age, 

 he began to practise as a physician, numbering Francis 

 Bacon himself among his patients. He was in 

 attendance on James I., and it fell to the lot of the 

 most modern physiologist of the time to superintend 

 the medical examination of women accused of witch- 

 craft. With Charles I. Harvey was on terms of 

 intimacy. The King had placed the resources of the 

 deer parks at Windsor and Hampton Court at the 

 disposal of his Court physician for experimental 

 purposes, and, with him, watched the development of 

 the chick in the egg and the pulsations of the living 

 heart. Harvey followed the King and was in charge 

 of the royal princes at the battle of Edgehill, viewing 

 the fight from the rear. He retired to Oxford with his 

 master, where for some time he was Warden of 

 Merton College. Having no children, he bequeathed 

 his paternal estate to the Royal College of Physicians, 

 directing them to use the proceeds " to search out and 

 study the secrets of nature." 



The essence of Harvey's great discovery lay not so 

 much in demonstrating the circulation of the blood 

 in the veins, which indeed had already been made clear 

 by the anatomists of the sixteenth century, as in 

 revealing the mechanism by which the circulation 

 was maintained. The existence and use of the valves 

 in the veins was also known, and Michael Servetus 

 (1511-1553), the Aragonese physician and theologian 

 who was burnt at Geneva by Calvin's orders, had 

 possessed himself of many of the actual facts of circula- 

 tion. Harvey's claim to fame lies in his correct 

 setting forth of the true meaning of the action of the 

 heart, as the organ responsible for maintaining the 



