Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/84

lxxx Generation (p. 423), and peruse what is said on the subject of 'parts not essential to the being of the individual,' and will then visit the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, he will find that the great comparative anatomist and physiologist of the 19th century had a herald in the great comparative anatomist and physiologist of the 17th century. Aubrey mentions particularly Harvey's having "often said that of all the losses he sustained, no grief was so crucifying to him as the loss of his papers (containing notes of his dissections of the frog, toad, and other animals,) which, together with his goods in his lodgings at Whitehall, were plundered at the beginning of the rebellion." Harvey's store of individual knowledge must have been great; and he seems never to have flagged in his anxiety to learn more. He made himself master of Oughtred's 'Clavis Mathematica' in his old age, according to Aubrey, who found him "perusing it, and working problems not long before he dyed."

Aubrey says "he understood Greek and Latin pretty well, but was no critique, and he wrote very bad Latin. The Circuitus Sanguinis was, as I take it, done into Latin by Sir George Ent, as also his booke de Generatione Animalium; but a little booke, in 12mo, against Riolan (I thinke) wherein he makes out his doctrine clearer, was writ by himself, and that, as I take it, at Oxford." Aubrey, in his gossiping, is doing injustice both to the scholarship and to the candour of Harvey. He heard or knew that Harvey wrote an indifferent hand, and this forsooth he turns into writing indifferent Latin. Everything points to the year 1619 as the period when the book De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (Aubrey does not even know the title!) was written; Ent, born in 1603, was then a lad of sixteen, and in all likelihood had never heard of Harvey's name; in 1628, when the work came forth at Frankfort, he was but twenty-five, and scarcely emancipated from the leading