Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on October 18, 1884 (IA b21778929).pdf/15

 biographies in epitaphs, our longer biographies in books bear witness to our dislike to the cremation of ideas and of individual life. There is, doubtless, much disintegration and cremation, of a very healthy sort, always going on among the works of the living as well as of the dead; and very small Urns might hold all that is worth keeping of the life-work of many. Still, even on these, we should like to engrave the names. Perhaps, in most lives, there are many things that those who lived them might gladly see burned away; but (as Sir Thomas Browne says) "we cannot hire oblivion," and even if "a wise oblivion be a greater good than a strong memory," we still like to preserve the individuality of the really great ones of the earth, and that, with all their faults; and we resent as we do with quite small people-either a flattering, or disparaging, or a one-sided picture.

Reading Harvey's own writings, his theses, their introduc- tions, their dedications, his disquisitions, exercises, letters and "obiter dicta," we find him writing, all unconsciously, his own biography; and this confers an unspeakable charm upon his works. He does not tell us of his birthplace, or parent- age, or where he was taught, or how he lived-which, thanks to many who have written of these things, from Aubrey and Ent to Willis, we know fairly well-but he reveals his very soul and life, his method of work, and his mode of thinking about it all; as he spent those long years of research, experiment, discovery and disputation, together with all the toils of a teacher, and the cares of a busy practitioner of medicine.

Thoughts, discoveries, and lives are quickly disintegrated in this fast-moving, restless age, the rate of whose movement shows acceleration every year; and so there is much indi- vidual work that must soon pass into, and be lost in the sun of common knowledge, and become only the ground- work upon which many a superstructure may be raised; but