THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 749 



published in the 'Lancet' of January 7, 1871, seem to me to be 

 certainly the most striking and possibly the most important. 

 Could anything have been more surprising to him whose memory 

 we here this day commemorate, than to have been told that an 

 injury to a particular part of the brain, the pons, called after the 

 excellent anatomist whose life ended in the very year in which his 

 had begun, would produce haemorrhage in certain parts of the 

 lungs, and anaemia, oedema, and emphysema in others? This is 

 an easy experiment to repeat ; it is one which might have been 

 done in the days of Harvey as easily as in those of Bernard, of 

 Budge, of Ludwig, and of Brown-Sequard. But easy though it 

 would have been to perform, I am bold to say it was well for 

 Harvey that he never happened to perform it. For considering 

 that, like Haller, he knew nothing of the contractility of arteries ; 

 considering that Hunter had not performed his now well-known 

 experiments with the umbilical arteries ; considering, Sir, that in 

 that excellent work on Physiology by Johannes Miiller, the trans- 

 lation of which in 1838, by our late and never sufficiently to be 

 lamented friend Dr. Baly, we owe to your suggestion, I find several 

 pages (vol. i. pp. 202-206, 214-219, ed. 1840) devoted to disjorov- 

 ing the muscular contractility of arteries ; considering, that it was 

 not till three years later, in 1841, that Henle's work, already re- 

 ferred to, appeared with its still unsuperseded figures, Plate III, 

 figures 8, 9, and 10 of the arteries with their circular muscular coat, 

 and with its excellent summary in letterpress of the whole subject, 

 pp. 518-526, and especially pp. 524, 525; when I consider that 

 nothing of all this had been done, to leave unmentioned other 

 advances connected with names of men yet living to speak for 

 themselves and for us — I say it may have been well that Harvey 

 never came upon the facts relating to the alterations of lung- 

 substance being entailed by destruction of brain- substance, not 

 difficult to be observed and reproduced, which we owe to Brown- 

 Sequard. For if he had come upon them, how could he have 

 explained them in the absence of the entire chain of connecting 

 facts, in the forging of which chain so many successive workers— 

 Purkinje, Valentin, Weber, Burdach, Stilling, and others -have all 

 contributed links ? Might not even Harvey, often as he withstood 

 such temptations, have, nevertheless, in default of power to assign 

 the real causes of such a phenomenon, been driven back upon some 



