Page:The Harveian Oration1876.djvu/8

 College to study and search out the secrets of Nature by way of experiment. And it may be hoped that in years to come there may be many names and many memories which will be recalled in this hall and on this anniversary, and that other discoveries, if not so splendid as that of Harvey’s, may still be enumerated with pride by successive Harveian orators. But on the present occasion I propose not to pass beyond a theme which has had for me a powerful attraction. When any one examines into this discovery of Harvey’s, and gradually recognises its extraordinary importance (for the full sense of what it is grows upon him as he studies it), he cannot but be seized with an urgent wish to know how the mind which solved so great a problem was constituted; how it worked, and how it reached, not merely the probability, but the certainty, of a grand natural law. The proof of the circulation of the blood was a discovery in the truest sense of the word. There was no accident about it—no help from what we call chance; it was worked out and thought out, point