Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th 1887 (IA b30475958).pdf/12

 and which had been an incubus on science ever since.

Only twenty-six short years after the first Harveian lectures were committed to paper, and fourteen after the treatise De Motu Sanguinis appeared, the wondrous boy was born who was destined in like manner to penetrate another of Nature’s mechanical mysteries, the problem of universal gravitation. Newton was fifteen years old when Harvey died, and already studying Oughtred’s Clavis Mathematical the very work which Aubrey found Harvey engaged upon, as above stated.

As regards Harvey’s classical scholarship, little needs to be added to what has already been well said. The scholar of Canterbury Grammar School and the pensioner of Caius College, Cambridge, was clearly well trained in classics, dialectics and physics. He evidently knew Aristotle thoroughly, und often quotes him, especially the grand treatise on Metaphysics, and the excellent book on the Generation of Animals, a quotation from which stands on the title sheet of the lectures. For it