Page:The Harveian oration for 1874.djvu/18

 been with many of our greatest artists, to whom the external world was but suggestive of the inner world in which they lived; to whom it appeared, not as it shows itself to others, but as it was translatable into their own language, or as they could clothe it in their own expression. Harvey had travelled much, and the few descriptive touches that we meet with in his writings are most picturesque and life-like. But they are brought forward merely to illustrate some point in his scientific researches. His account of the Bass Rock and of the countless birds that inhabit it, ‘more numerous than the stars that appear on the unclouded moonless sky,’ is so true to nature that it at once recalls to all who were so fortunate as to see it Graham’s picture in the exhibition of our Royal Academy three years ago. And yet this minuteness of observation, this beauty of description, are but subordinate to a detail of the process by which the hard shell is formed round the egg. And so, a few paragraphs further on, we find ourselves on the tiptoe of expectation when