THE REVIVAL OF SCIENCE 293 



The second man of outstanding genius in 

 British science in the seventeenth century was 

 Harvey, who, like Newton, worked in one of 

 the two sciences which, in Stewart times, were, 

 to some extent, ahead of all the others. Harvey, 

 " the little choleric man " as Aubrey calls him, 

 was educated at Cambridge and at Padua and 

 was in his thirty-eighth year when, in his lectures 

 on anatomy, he expounded his new doctrine of 

 the circulation of the blood to the College of 

 Physicians, although his " Exercitatio " on this 

 subject did not appear till 1628. His notes 

 for the lectures are now in the British Museum. 

 He was physician to Charles I. ; and it is on 

 record how, during the battle of Edgehill, he 

 looked after the young princes as he sat reading a 

 book under a hedge a little removed from the 

 fight. 



In the chain of evidence of his convincing 

 demonstration of the circulation of the blood, 

 one link, only to be supplied by the invention 

 of the compound microscope, was missing. This, 

 the discovery of the capillaries, was due to Mal- 

 pighi, who was amongst the earliest anatomists 

 to apply the compound microscope to animal 

 tissues. Still, as Dryden has it, 



