Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, on October 18, 1884 (IA b21778929).pdf/20

 all thoughts must run, rather adopt the mood of the great scientific poet of Nature, and feel that "seeing of a thousand seeds, she scarcely brings but one to bear," we should join him in his doubt, and "tremble where we firmly stood"?

If it be that Harvey was right-which modern scientific observation has shown that he was not, when he suggested that the force which converted sterility into fertility was one that pervaded the whole body,' and might last almost indefinitely; then, upon analogy, we might argue that the thought of the great discoverers of all past time may have fertilized the whole race of the thinkers that followed them, and of the thinkers yet unborn; and so " discovery" and "originality" are " surds;" for they could have had no beginning. To this it may be replied-The modern appliances of scientific research have shown that, in some points, Harvey had no means of correcting the dicta of his forerunners by his favourite appeal to Nature. Is it not possible then that we are as yet unsupplied with all the apparatus criticus for determining whether or no there is such a possibility as an "original thought?"

i. As a means of estimating the largeness of Harvey's mind, and the wide range of his vision, and how much there was that he "saw" but scarcely can be said to have "looked at," let me recall to your notice some of the more interesting of his previsions, as forming part of the work of the individual whose memory we meet to-day to cherish. We find him saying, "In general the first processes of Nature lie hid, as it were, in the depths of night, and by reason of their subtlety escape the keenest reason no less than the most piercing eye." In another paper, "All living things. . . . derive their origin from a certain primary some-

1 Thesis on Conception, p. 576, in edition of the works of Harvey, by Dr. Rt. Willis, for the Sydenham Society. 2 Anatomical Exercises on the Generation of Animals, p. 225.