Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/182

82 which is because they are present before the heart [the ventricular portion] makes its appearance or suffices for its office even when it has appeared, and they therefore have, as it were, the duty of the whole heart committed to them, as has already been demonstrated. But what I have observed in the formation of the fœtus as before remarked (and Aristotle had already confirmed all in studying the incubated egg,) throws the greatest light and likelihood upon the point. Whilst the fœtus is yet in the guise of a soft worm, or, as is commonly said, in the milk, there is a mere bloody point or pulsating vesicle, a portion apparently of the umbilical vein, dilated at its commencement or base; by and by, when the outline of the fœtus is distinctly indicated, and it begins to have greater bodily consistence, the vesicle in question having become more fleshy and stronger, and changed its position, passes into the auricles, over or upon which the body of the heart begins to sprout, though as yet it apparently performs no duty; but when the fœtus is farther advanced, when the bones can be distinguished from the soft parts, and movements take place, then it has also a heart internately which pulsates, and, as I have said, throws blood by either ventricle from the vena cava into the arteries.

Thus nature, ever perfect and divine, doing nothing in vain, has neither given a heart where it was not required, nor produced it before its office had become necessary; but by the same stages in the development of every animal, passing through the constitutions of all, as I may say (ovum, worm, fœtus), it acquires perfection in each. These points will be found elsewhere confirmed by numerous observations on the formation of the fœtus.

Finally, it was not without good grounds that Hippocrates, in his book, 'De Corde,' intitles it a muscle; as its action is the same, so is its function, viz., to contract and move something else, in this case, the charge of blood.

Farther, as in muscles at large, so can we infer the action and use of the heart from the arrangement of its fibres and its general structure. All anatomists admit with Galen that the body of the heart is made up of various courses of fibres running straight, obliquely, and transversely, with reference to one another; but in a heart which has been boiled the arrangement of the fibres is seen to be different: all the fibres in the parietes and septum are circular, as in the sphincters;