730 THE HAKVEIAN ORATION. 



expressed this natural hesitation. I wish to record that you pointed 

 out to me that my function in Oxford was to pursue and lecture 

 publicly upon the very subjects with which Harvey occupied him- 

 self; and I suggested to myself that what could with any propriety 

 form the substance of a course of lectures in the one place, could, 

 mutatis mutandis^ furnish materials for an address in the other. 

 I felt besides, that, as the President of the College of Physicians is 

 by virtue of his office one of the five electors to the Linacre Pro- 

 fessorship, the Linacre Professor might seem scarcely justified in 

 declining an invitation to appear before the learned body to which 

 in part he owed his position ; and, though I mention it last, I felt 

 first of all that a wish expressed to me, not so much by the official 

 whom I am now addressing, as by the individual who now more 

 than twenty years ago introduced me to Harvey's hospital, and has 

 persistently befriended me ever since, was a wish which I ought not 

 lightly to disregard. If now. Sir, I follow an example which you 

 have often set me, and, without needless preface or further personal 

 allusions, address myself at once to the business before me, I shall 

 thereby pay you the best of all compliments, by showing you that 

 your teaching has not been wholly thrown away upon your former 

 pupil. 



The time allotted to me I propose to occupy, firstly, in expound- 

 ing with all pos§ible brevity certain advances recently made in our 

 knowledge of the anatomy and physiology of the circulatory organs; 

 and, secondly, in giving the as yet unrecorded history of one of the 

 many attempts to rob Harvey of his rightful rank in the noble 

 army of discoverers, which were made in the latter half of the 

 seventeenth century. 



Some of the last, if not the very last, of the many fruitful ex- 

 periments which Harvey performed in the way of interrogating 

 Nature as to the circulation, were experiments in the way of 

 injection. If the writer of a work which appeared but some forty- 

 three years ago, ' On the Diseases and Injuries of Arteries ^' had 

 taken the pains to repeat those experiments which Harvey per- 

 formed more than two hundred and twenty years ago, and when in 



* ' On the Diseases and Injuries of Arteries, with the Operations required for their 

 Cure ; being the substance of the Lectures delivered in the Theatre of the Royal 

 College of Surgeons in the spring of MDCCCXXix.' By G. J. Guthrie, F.R.S. London, 

 1830. 



