Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu/67

 61 statements, and very much of it is pure guesswork, as I have already shown/ These words, the Latin ones, not my translation of them, were published, if not written, nine years (see p. 5, Harveii Opera, ed. 1766, Dedicatio) and more after Harvey had first proved the facts of the circulation, and from them we gather that his discovery had, even so early as that date, got out of the stage in which a discovery is considered to be untrue, and got into that in which it is said that everybody knew it before. In no sub- ject could it have been easier to make out a plausible case than in this of the circula- lation of the blood. Piccolhomini (an ac- quaintance with whom I owe to Mr. Walter Warner, see his treatise, pp. 194, 200, 201) had given a diagram, it is there before you copied from the copy of his work in our library, of the junction of the portal and hepatic twigs, incorrect enough, no doubt, and obtained by a false method (see Harvey, Epistola Prima ad Riolanum, p. 105, ed. 1766), but still something in the way of a 1 I have not thought it necessary to reproduce it in a woodcut.