THE REVIVAL OF SCIENCE 127 



by Dean Peacock as "the greatest single tri- 

 umph of the human mind."^ 



The second man of outstanding genius in 

 British science in the seventeenth century was 

 Harvey, who, hke Newton, worked in one of 

 the two sciences which, in Stewart times, were, 

 to some extent, ahead of all the others. Har- 

 vey, "the little choleric man" as Aubrey calls 

 him, was educated at Cambridge and at Padua 

 and was in his thirty-eighth year when, in his 

 lectures on anatomy, he expounded his new 

 doctrine of the circulation of the blood to the 

 College of Physicians, although his Eocercitatio 

 on this subject did not appear till 1628. His 

 notes for the lectures are now in the British 

 Museum. He was physician to Charles I; 

 and it is on record how, during the battle of 

 Edgehill, he looked after the young princes as 

 he sat reading a book under a hedge a little 

 removed from the fight. 



In the chain of evidence of his convincing 

 demonstration of the circulation of the blood, 



^ Newton held the office of president of the Royal Society 

 for the last twenty-five years of his life, a period exceeded only 

 in the case of one president, Sir Joseph Banks. 



