no SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. pt. III. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



SCIENCE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (CONTINUED). 



Fabricius Aquapendente discovers Valves in the Veins — Harvey's dis- 

 covery of the Circulation of the Blood — Discovery of the Vessels 

 which carry nourishment to the Blood — Gaspard Asellius notices 

 the Lacteals— Pecquet discovers the Passage of the fluid to the 

 Heart — RUdbeck discovers the Lymphatics. 



Harvey's Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood, 1619. 



—In the year 1600, when Galileo and Kepler were still at 

 the beginning of their discoveries, a young Englishman of 

 two-and-twenty, named Harvey, who was born at Folkestone 

 in 1578, went to Padua to study anatomy under the famous 

 professor Fabricius Aquapendente. Although anatomists 

 had by this time learnt a great deal about the bones and 

 parts of a dead body, yet they were still very ignorant about 

 the working of a living one. They knew that arteries throb, 

 like the pulse in the wrist, which is an artery ; and that veins 

 (that is, the blue branching tubes which you can see under 

 the skin in your hand and arm) contain blood and do not 

 throb like the arteries, but they had no clear idea of the use 

 of either arteries or veins. Vesalius had believed, like 

 Aristotle, that the arteries contained chiefly a kind of air 

 called ' vital spirits,' which they carried from the heart to all 

 parts of the body ; and that the blood was pumped back- 

 wards and forwards from the veins to the heart by the act of 

 breathing. A Spaniard named Servetus, an Italian named 



