Page:The Harveian oration, 1875 (IA b22314611).pdf/19

 tion, I venture to submit to you a brief analytical sketch of the circulation of the blood as Harvey understood it.

I may premise that nowhere, unless I am greatly mistaken, does Harvey tell us when and where (whether while a student at the University of Padua, or while studying for his degree at Cambridge, or after settling here in London) those doubts and misgivings entered his mind, without which in his case as in others, there could have been neither motive nor stimulus to inquiry. The first glimpse we get of him is when, seeking to discover the motions and uses of the heart by actual inspection of the living animal, and not from the writings of others, he stands perplexed and bewildered by the rapid alternation of dilatation and contraction, coming and going in the twinkling of an eye, like a flash of lightning; not surprised that Andreas Laurentius found these motions as perplexing as did Aristotle the flux and reflux of Euripus (that narrow sea between Boeotia and Eubœa which ebbed and flowed seven times a day or oftener) and almost tempted with Eracastorius, to think “that the motion of the heart was only to be comprehended by God.” He is, as it