Page:The Harveian oration 1906.djvu/36

30 THE GROWTH OF TRUTH which are too far ahead of their contemporaries to be appreciated. The same event happened to Newton’s Principia; as Sir William Petty remarks, 'I have not met with one man that put an extraordinary value on the book.'

Among Englishmen, Primrose alone, brought up among the strictest sect of the Galenists, and at the time not a Fellow—wrote a criticism from the old standpoint (1632), and remained unconvinced twelve years later, as his controversy with Regius shows. And only one special treatise in favour of the circula- tion was written in England—that of Sir George Ent, a pupil and friend of Harvey, who wrote (1641) specially against Parisanus, a Venetian, a foeman quite unworthy of his quill. In the universities the new doctrine rapidly gained acceptance—in Cambridge through the influence of Glisson, while in part to Harvey’s work and influence may be attributed that only too brief but golden renaissance of science at Oxford. A little incident mentioned in the autobiographical notes of the celebrated Wallis shows how the subject was taken up quite early in the universities : 'And I took into it the speculative part of physick and anatomy as parts of natural philosophy, and, as Dr. Glisson has since told me, I was the first of his sons who (in a public disputation) maintained the circulation of the blood, which was then a new doctrine, though I had no design of practising physick.' This was in the early ‘thirties’. But the older views were very hard to displace, and as late as 1651 we find such intelligent members of the 'invisible college’ as Boyle and Petty carrying out experiments together in Ireland to satisfy themselves as to the truth of the circulation of the blood.

It took much longer for the new views to reach the