THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 755 



ut ante demonstratum est.' This may be translated thus : ' But 



it may be said, that all competent persons accept these views in a 

 more or less modified form^ and have been convinced of the truth 

 of them from the structure of the heart, and the contrivance, posi- 

 tion, and use of the valves. But they seem to me to make as little 

 use of their eyes as men do who are stumbling- about in a dark 

 place, and their account of the matter is made up of heterogeneous, 

 contradictory, and incompatible statements, and very much of it is 

 pure guesswork, as I have already shown.' These words, the Latin 

 ones, not my translation of them, were published, if not written, 

 nine years (see p. 5, ' Harveii Opera,' ed. 1766, Dedicatio) and more 

 after Harvey had first proved the facts of the circulation, and from 

 them we gather that his discovery had, even so early as that date, 

 got out of the stage in which a discovery is considered to be 

 untrue, and got into that in which it is said that everybody knew 

 it before. In no subject could it have been easier to make out a 

 plausible case than in this of the circulation of the blood. Piecol- 

 homini (an acquaintance with whom I owe to Mr. Walter Warner, 

 see his treatise, pp. 194, 300, 201) had given a diagram, it is there 

 before you \ copied from the copy of his work in our library, of the 

 junction of the portal and hepatic twigs^ incorrect enough, no doubt, 

 and obtained by a false method (see Harvey, ' Epistola Prima ad 

 Riolanum/ p. 105, ed. 1766), but still something in the way of a 

 working hypothesis (see Piccolhomini, 'Anat. Praelect.,' Romae, 

 1586, p. 117, and Warner, MS. p. 194). Servetus had speculated, 

 but rightly, as to the lesser circulation ; so had Caesalpinus ; and 

 on Harvey's own showing (p. 15, and ed. Willis, ed. 1766), Realdus 

 Columbus; and Walter Warner, p. 132 (4394 Birch Coll. MS.) 

 had spoken of the heart, in 1610, as being 'a mere muscle, very 

 strongly and artificially woven, and contrived with omnimodal 

 nerveous fibres, direct, transverse, and oblike, as it were of purpose, 

 for dilatation and contraction, according to the fashion of other 

 muscles.' And of the action of the auriculo-ventricular and arterial 

 valves, Harvey himself, nived animd, with untarnished sincerity, 

 repeatedly (see 'De Motu,' pp. 14, 51, S?>^ 6^, 81) speaks as of 

 something known to all men, 'id omnes norunt' (p. 44). What 

 then, it might have been triumphantly asked, was there left for 

 Harvey to discover, when the action of the valves of the heart, its 



* I have not thought it necessary to reproduce it in a woodcut. 



