io8 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. PT. in. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



SCIENCE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (CONTINUED). 



Fabricius Aquapendente Harvey discovers the circulation of the Blood 

 Gaspard Asellius Pecquet Rudbeck. 



Harvey's Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood, 

 1619. In the year 1600, when Galileo and Kepler were 

 still at the beginning of their discoveries, a young English- 

 man of two-and-twenty, named Harvey, who was born at 

 Folkestone .in 1578, went to Padua to study anatomy under 

 the famous professor Fabricius Aquapendente. Although 

 anatomists had by this time learnt a great deal about the 

 bones and parts of a dead body, yet they were still very igno- 

 rant about the working of a living one. They knew that 

 arteries throb, as for example the pulse in the wrist, which is 

 an artery; and that veins (that is, the blue branching tubes 

 which you can see under the skin in your hand and arm) 

 contain blood and do not throb like the arteries ; but they 

 had no clear idea of the use of either arteries or veins. 

 Vesalius had believed, like Aristotle, that the arteries con- 

 tained chiefly a kind of air called ' vital spirits,' which they 

 carried from the heart to all parts of the body ; and that 

 the blood was pumped backwards and forwards from the 

 veins to the heart by the act of breathing. A Spaniard 

 named Servetus, an Italian named Columbus, and the 

 botanist Caesalpinus, who all lived in the sixteenth century, 



