Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/239

 immersion in the cold water would repress their ebullition, but with blood only, and such as could never make its way back into the arteries, either by open-mouthed communications or by devious passages; it shows, moreover, how and in what way those who are travelling over snowy mountains are sometimes stricken suddenly with death, and other things of the same kind.

Lest it should seem difficult for the blood to make its way through the pores of the various structures of the body, I shall add one illustration: The same thing happens in the bodies of those that are hanged or strangled, as in the arm that is bound with a fillet: all the parts beyond the noose,—the face, lips, tongue, eyes, and every part of the head appear gorged with blood, swollen and of a deep red or livid colour; but if the noose be relaxed, in whatever position you have the body, before many hours have passed you will perceive the whole of the blood to have quitted the head and face, and gravitated through the pores of the skin, flesh, and other structures, from the superior parts towards those that are inferior and dependent, until they become tumid and of a dark colour. But if this happens in the dead body, with the blood dead and coagulated, the frame stiffened with the chill of death, the passages all compressed or blocked up, it is easy to perceive how much more apt it will be to occur in the living subject, when the blood is alive and replete with spirits, when the pores are all open, the fluid ready to penetrate, and the passage in every way made easy.

When the ingenious and acute Descartes, (whose honourable mention of my name demands my acknowledgments,) and others, having taken out the heart of a fish, and put it on a plate before them, see it continuing to pulsate (in contracting), and when it raises or erects itself and becomes firm to the touch, they think it enlarges, expands, and that its ventricles thence become more capacious. But, in my opinion, they do not observe correctly; for, at the time the heart gathers itself up, and becomes erect, it is certain that it is rather lessened in every one of its dimensions; that it is in its systole, in short, not in its diastole. Neither, on the contrary, when it collapses and sinks down, is it then properly in its state of diastole and distension, by which the ventricles become more capacious. But as we do not say that the heart is in the state of diastole in the dead body, as having sunk relaxed after the systole, but