Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on October 18, 1884 (IA b21778929).pdf/16

 the personality of Harvey can never be lost sight of, so long as this College stands, and so long as there are men who care to "read between the lines" of his great works, and find in them the portrait of himself.

It is important, in our attempt to realize this portrait, that we should look-in order to appreciate its value-at the background of the time in which the great artist sketched it.

a. Harvey's work of discovery, like that of all great dis- coveries-into whatever reach of knowledge and of thought they may have broken-was not unprepared. Men were, in his time, cagerly looking for a light that they felt sure was coming; and there were streaks of dawn in the Eastern sky, that led them to find the Man, and the Truth, for which they had been seeking; so that what before had been myste- rious, was now clear; what had been dark, was now illumined; what they had sought for, now they found.

The contents of the "shell," on the like of which Harvey afterwards wrote so much, were teeming with a growing life that showed but vague signs upon its smooth, unbroken surface; but Harvey broke the shell, and there burst forth at once, into a seen life, a form and meaning for which all the growing processes within that shell were made. There was a new thing, a new thought, a new generalization. There was the solution of the problem of yesterday, the answered riddle, the platform for to-morrow's work.

All honour to those who, toiling slowly in the night, or in the dawn, with its mist and mystery, have yet made some headway forward and upward, and prepared the path for one among them, who has shared their labour, their weariness, their disappointments, and their woes; but, who suddenly makes, as it were, a leap to a wider range or to a higher level; and, thence, holds out the hand of strength and fellowship to place them by his side. We honour the