Page:The Harveian oration delivered at the Royal College of Physicians June 26, 1889 (IA b22361285).pdf/20

 fact that the physical sciences can only assist medicine incidentally, and often most indirectly, not only explains the position of the art immediately after the time of Hippocrates, but through every following century. It must not be forgotten that we have only just ceased to intersperse our language with that which we now regard as little else than jargon. It is scarcely credible, but nevertheless it is the fact, that so lately as 1711 we find an English physician translating a medical book written long after the discoveries of Harvey had been published, in which the learned translator indulges recklessly in hypothesis. He tells us how he selected Sylvius and Willis as patterns—blaming the former, however, for referring all the corruptions of the humours to the vicious effervescences of the acids and alkalies, and regretting the error of the latter in his attempted explanation of convulsive affections, which are so probably accounted for by the prevalence of an acid, or, to use his own quaint diction, ‘some such grating substance for their cause.’

As to the author Avhose work he translates (the learned Etimüller of Leipsic), we find him endowing Ascarides with qualities indicating either a most