Page:The Harveian oration, 1875 (IA b22314611).pdf/51

 ilation. For my part I think the account I have extracted from Harvey’s works the more feasible.

Need I tell you that Harvey does not stand alone among great discoverers in thus displaying an easy belief in matters that lie beyond the sphere of their own special inquiries; or that in his case, as in theirs, to take no note of such matters would be to substitute an impossible hero for a truly great man. The portrait of the discoverer of the circulation will not be the worse for a few shadows. They will but make it the more real.

What now remains to be said of Harvey must be said in as few words as possible. Let us first weigh his great discovery in his own scales. This is what Harvey himself says of it:—“Reflecting on every part of medicine, physiology, pathology, semeiotics, therapeutics, when I see how many questions can be answered, how many doubts resolved, how much obscurity illustrated, by the truth we have declared, the light we have made to shine, I see a field of such vast extent in which I might proceed so far, and expatiate so widely, that this my tractate would not only swell into a volume, but my whole life, perchance, would not suffice for its completion;” and again, after noting