Page:The Harveian oration for 1874.djvu/36

 in our universities—brought then no sense of inferiority, for all felt equal in their citizenship in the commonwealth of learning. Casserius projected a large work on anatomy, illustrated with beautiful engravings, which the curious may still admire and the student still profit from. Death overtook him in the midst of his unfinished task, three years before his master passed away in advanced old age.

Let these suffice as samples of the men with whom Harvey was in daily intercourse. It would be easy enough, especially if one travelled beyond the somewhat narrow circle of those whose pursuits were exclusively connected with the profession of medicine, to swell the list of those remarkable alike for their genius and their culture, who were the inheritors of all that was most worth the possessing of that wonderful renaissance, that new birth of the world, out of which came alike the evil and the good of modern society.

The commencement of that epoch was like the thawing of some mighty frost-bound stream. Northern travellers tell us how with the approach of spring the long silence of winter is disturbed by strange sounds, loud cracking,