Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/468

464 sugar for salt in his food. This observation is rather interesting in the light of the modern notion that excess of common salt leads to a retention of sodium urateuric acid [sic] in the tissues; it looks as though Harvey had found this out by experience.

As regards portraits of this epoch-maker, we are fortunate in possessing more than one. I have mentioned the van Bemmel, the engraving of which by Houbraken is well known. The oil painting in the upper Library Hall of the Royal College of Physicians, represents Harvey in later life. It was painted by Cornelius Jansen and survived the fire of London. There is also a head by an unknown artist in the National Portrait Gallery in London; this is the portrait reproduced in the memorial edition of the "De Motu" (Canterbury, 1894). In the rooms of the Royal Society in Burlington House, there hangs another head, a portrait of Harvey done by Jan de Reyn; it is undated.

My learned friend, Sir James Sawyer, M.D., of Birmingham, England, points out an interesting difference between the styles of dress in the two portraits, the Jansen and the de Reyn; in the former the collar is that of a cavalier, in the latter of a Cromwellian. Harvey lived eight years under the commonwealth; and Sir James's inference is that he altered his dress to accord better with the more solemn taste prevailing during the period of Cromwell's power.

As regards statues of Harvey, there are only two in the open air in England, as far as I know. One in stone is high up on the pediment of the building of the College of Physicians in Pall Mall where he stands between Linacre and Sydenham: the other is of bronze on a high pedestal on Folkestone Leas; there he stands looking out across the Channel away to those lands where he received his inspiration and where he was first sympathetically understood.

In connection with Harvey's religious position, we have hardly any facts to go on. Some have surmised that because he travelled with the Earl of Arundel, Harvey also must have been a Roman Catholic. I hardly think that a papist would have begun his will in the words he does

In any case, the prince of biologists can not be accused of irreverence, far less of atheism. Harvey was the very opposite of irreligious. Once and again in his writings he alludes to divine purposes and designs. He says when he first looked at the beating heart, its movements were so tumultuous as to be comprehended by God alone. Referring to the valves in the veins, he says they were so placed by divine purpose.

William Harvey died at Roehampton in Surrey, on the third of