Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 2 of 2).djvu/77

 LETTERS.

��LETTER I.

To Caspar Hofmann, M.D. Published at Nurenberg, in the ' Spicilegium Illustrium Epistolarum ad Casp. Hqfmannum.'

YOUR opinion of me_, my most learned Hofmann, so candidly given, and of the motion and circulation of the blood, is ex- tremely gratifying to me; and I rejoice that I have been permitted to see and to converse with a man so learned as yourself, whose friendship I as readily embrace as I cordially return it. But I find that you have been pleased first ela- borately to inculpate me, and then to make me pay the penalty, as having seemed to you " to have impeached and condemned Nature of folly and error ; and to have imputed to her the character of a most clumsy and inefficient artificer, in suffering the blood to become recrudescent, and making it return again and again to the heart in order to be recon- cocted, to grow effete as often in the general system ; thus uselessly spoiling the perfectly-made blood, merely to find her in something to do." But where or when anything of the kind was ever said, or even imagined by me by me, who, on the contrary, have never lost an opportunity of expressing my admiration of the wisdom and aptness and industry of Nature, as you do not say, I am not a little disturbed to find such things charged upon me by a man of sober judg- ment like yourself. In my printed book, I do, indeed, assert that the blood is incessantly moving out from the heart by the arteries to the general system, and returning from this

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