Page:The Harveian oration 1912.djvu/10

6 doubt it has often been said or thought before, that apart altogether from the coming into being of any particular man, the circulation of the blood, even to the full extent of Harvey’s demonstrations, must have become common knowledge sooner or later. Even so, in his time, with anæsthetics still in the womb of the far distant future, with instruments of precision hardly in their infancy, what a magnificent triumph of patient and determined observation was his! and it does but enhance the reverence we owe to him to add that the truest estimate of his fame rests even less perhaps on what he did than on how he did it; less on how he did it than on how he said it, or showed that he had worked it out in thought. It is the completeness of his work that is so surprising, and it is the plan of campaign that Harvey carried out by searching out the secrets of Nature with such deliberate self-content, that will, as a motive power, stretch farther along the ages even than the actual conditions that he demonstrated, great as these truly were and are.

Harvey taught us how to work, and what to work at, and showed that the knowledge of the structure of our tissues goes far to suggest their functions. By actual investigation, by experiment, by what now goes by the name of “original research,” and the reasoning and suggestion that emanate therefrom, the anatomy and even the larger details of the physiology of the circulation were worked out, and, in the absence of any adequate powers of magnification, discovery in that direction must then have seemed to have reached its farthest limit. Yet who knows but what Harvey himself, physiologist, physician,