Page:The Harveian oration 1905.djvu/17

 November 8th, 1605, in the fiftieth year of her age. No doubt she guided and encouraged her son during his early life, and under her supervision he is supposed to have acquired the rudiments of an English education. Harvey belonged to a well-to-do, prosperous, and happily united family, and appears always to have had abundant means to pursue any course which he might select. He began his studies at an early period of life, and no doubt soon became an ardent and devoted worker. He entered the grammar school of Canterbury when ten years old, and in May 1593, having just entered upon his sixteenth year, became a pensioner at Caius-Gonville College at Cambridge. In 1597, when nineteen years of age, he took his degree of B.A. of the University of Cambridge. Harvey then proceeded to Padua to prepare for the profession of medicine, where under Fabricius and other able masters, as Willis says, "he drank in the elementary knowledge which served him as a foundation for that induction which has made his name immortal." In April 1602, when in the twenty-fifth year of his age, he obtained his diploma as Doctor of Physic of that university, with "licence to practise and to teach arts and medicine in every land and seat of learning." Harvey then returned to England and received his Doctor's degree from the University of Cambridge in 1603. He settled in London in 1604, and entered on the practice of his profession. In the same year