764 THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 



his imagination was vivid and active enough, his study (for to this 

 perhaps we may ascribe it) of the excellent models mentioned saved 

 him, as such a study can save a man, from falling into the use of 

 false or extravagant imagery. 



Harvey, besides the advantages accruing from acquaintance with 

 the great minds of the past, enjoyed also those which may be gotten 

 from familiar intercourse with great contemporary minds. These 

 advantages constitute in themselves a second education ; and they 

 were at Harvey^s command for the period of more than forty years 

 during which he was prominently before the public. It is recorded 

 as one of the many distinctions of John Greaves (see ' Life,' by 

 T. Smith, 1699, p. 44), the once celebrated astronomer and anti- 

 quary, and a man whom we can well believe to have done more, as 

 a Fellow of Merton, than give a silent vote for Harvey when he 

 was chosen Warden, that he was one of the friends of Harvey as 

 well as of Archbishops Laud and Usher. It is indeed in a letter to 

 this latter dignitary, and in answer, we may suppose, to an appeal 

 from him on behalf of Harvey, that we find John Greaves pledging 

 himself in a postscript, under date Sept. 19, 1644, the year before 

 Harvey's election as Warden of Merton, to the following effect : 

 *If I may serve Dr. Harvy (sic) I shall be most ready either 

 here or at Leyden to do it.' (See 'Life of James Usher,^ by 

 Richard Parr, D.D., 1686, p. 510)^ His well-known connection 



^ I owe this last i-eference to the 'Biographia Britannica,' suh voc. Greaves. For 

 a further account see Wood's 'Athenae Oxonienses,' vol. iii. ed. Bliss, 181 7. To the 

 former of these sources I owe a second and more interesting reference, viz. to Birch's 

 edition, 1737, of the 'Miscellaneous Works of John Greaves,' where, at the end of 

 Greaves' 'Treatise on the Pyramids' (pp. 136, 137), we have given us an account of a 

 conversation between him and Harvey. It runs thus : ' That I and my company 

 should have continued so many hours in the Pjo-amid and live (whereas we found no 

 inconvenience) was much wondered at by Dr. Harvey, his majesty's learned physician. 

 For, said he, seeing we never breathe the same air twice, but still new air is required 

 to a new respiration (the succus olibilis of it being spent in every expiration), it 

 could not be but by long breathing we should have spent the aliment of that small 

 stock of air within, and have been stifled ; unless there were some secret tunnels con- 

 veying it to the top of the Pyramid whereby it might pass out and make way for fresh 

 air to come in at the entrance below.' The Fellow of Merton was not wanting in an 

 answer to the future Warden, assuring him, amongst much else not wholly correct, 

 that ' as for any tubuli to let out the fuliginous air at the top of the Pyramid none 

 could be discovered within or without.' Harvey replied, * they might be so small as 

 that they could not easily be discerned, and yet might be sufficient to make way for 

 the air, being a thin and subtil body.' It has, indeed, been left to our own times and 

 to V. Pettenkofer to demonstrate and exhibit the action of the capillary pores in the 



