Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/83

Rh Upon the purely Deistic notions of antiquity, however, Harvey unquestionably ingrafted the special faith in Christianity. In connexion with the subject of the "term utero-gestation," he adduces the highest recorded examples as the rule, and speaks of "Christ, our Saviour, of men the most perfect;" in the will he farther "most humbly renders his soul to Him that gave it, and to his blessed Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus."

Harvey was very inquisitive into natural things and natural phenomena. When he accompanied the Earl of Arundel, we have seen that he would still be wandering in the woods, making observations on the strange trees and herbs, and minerals he encountered. His industry in collecting facts was unwearied, and the accuracy with which he himself observed appears in every page of his writings; though we sometimes meet him amiably credulous in regard to the observations of others,—as in that instance where he suffers himself to be imposed upon by the traveller's tale of the "Genus humanum caudatum"—the race of the human kind with tails. Harvey was the first English comparative anatomist; in other words, he was the first physiologist England produced whom superiority of natural endowment led to perceive the relations between the meanest and the highest of created things, and who made the simplicity of structure and of function in the one, a means of explaining the complexity of structure and of function in the other. "Had anatomists," he says, "only been as conversant with the dissection of the lower animals as they are with that of the human body, many matters that have hitherto kept them in a perplexity of doubt would, in my opinion, have met them freed from every kind of difficulty." (On the Heart, p. 35.) Harvey makes frequent and most effectual use of his knowledge of comparative anatomy in his earlier work; and if the reader will turn to the one on