CHAPTER XXXIII 

 1878 



The year 1878 was the tercentenary of Harvey's birth, 

 and Huxley was very busy with the Hfe and work of that 

 great physician. He spoke at the memorial meeting at the 

 College of Physicians (July 18), he gave a lecture on Harvey 

 at the Royal Institution on January 25, afterwards published 

 in Nature and the Fortnightly Review, and intended to write 

 a book on him in a projected English Men of Science series 

 (see p. 536). 



I am very glad you like " Harvey " (he writes to Prof. 

 Baynes on Feb. 11). He is one of the biggest scientific minds 

 we have had. I expect to get well vilipended not only by the 

 anti-vivisection folk, for the most of whom I have a hearty con- 

 tempt, but apropos of Bacon. I have been oppressed by the 

 humbug of the " Baconian Induction " all my life, and at last 

 the worm has turned. 



Now in this lecture he showed that Harvey employed 

 vivisection to establish the doctrine of the circulation of the 

 blood, and furthermore, that he taught this doctrine before 

 the Novum Organum was published, and that his subsequent 

 Exercitatio displays no trace of being influenced by Bacon's 

 work. After glancing at the superstitious reverence for the 

 " Baconian Induction," he pointed out Bacon's ignorance of 

 the progress of science up to his time, and his inability to 

 divine the importance of what he knew by hearsay of the 

 work of Copernicus, or Kepler, or Galileo ; of Gilbert, his 

 contemporary, or of Galen ; and wound up by quoting Ellis's 

 severe judgment of Bacon in the General Preface to the 

 Philosophic Works, in Spedding's classical edition (p. 38) : — 

 520 



