Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu/89

 83 the court must have constantly brought him into relation with the statesmen of those stormy times. His legacy to his ' good friend Mr. Thomas Hobbs, to buy something to keepe in remembrance' of him, is touching, even if trifling, evidence in the same direction. Travel, which even in our day confers a kind of culture peculiar to itself, must have discerned, and yet might be sufficient to make way for the air, being a thin and subtil body.' It has, indeed, been left to our own times and to v. Pettenkofer to de- monstrate and exhibit the action of the capillary pores in the constituents of a mass of ' solid ' masonry (see his Beziehungen der Luft zu Kleidung, "Wohnung und Boden, 1872, pp. 41-45, and especially the figures p. 42). What Leeuwenhoek and Malpighi did for the capillaries of the animal body in supplementation of Harvey's work, and in correction of one of his few errors, that v. Pettenkofer has done in supplementation of Harvey's suggestion as to ' tubuli so small as that they could not easily be discerned ' in structures like the Pyramids. It is, perhaps, not more than curious to note that Harvey was equally right in sug- gesting the existence of larger ' secret tunnels' : an account of the discovery and opening of them may be found in Colonel Howard Yy se's Operations carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh, 1837, i. pp. 3, 263, 285-288 ; ii. 160, 161; and an amusing history of the inconveniences endured in the in- terior of the Pyramids previously to the discovery of these ' air-channels ' is given by Colonel Coutelle in Description de l'Egypte, Antiquite's, Memoires, ii. 46, 1809.