Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu/21

 fret if his own age, in his own estimation, do him scanty justice. Posterity ordinarily—I do not say always—rectifies these false judgments; it has done so, at all events, in the cases of the men so grotesquely grouped together by Pecquet. Haller, for example, writing in 1774 (Bibliotheca Anatomica, i. p. 301), speaks of Riolanus as 'vir asper et in nuperos suosque coaevos immitis ac nemini parcens, nimis avidus suarum laudum praeco, et se ipso fatente anatomicorum princeps.' The duty of attacking and abolishing such a man may, or indeed must have been, a disagreeable one to his contemporaries. They appear to have shirked it : it was their duty to have faced it, notwithstanding it might have been disagreeable.

Harvey used for these experiments a somewhat rough injecting apparatus, ' quem-admodum in clysteribus injiciendis fieri