Page:The advancement of science by experimental research - the Harveian oration, delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, June 27th, 1883 (IA b24869958).pdf/28

24 be supplied by the juices of the ingested aliment, without the veins on the one hand becoming drained and the arteries on the other getting ruptured through the excessive charge of blood, unless the blood should somehow find its way from the arteries into the veins, and so return to the other side of the heart, I began to think whether there might not be a motion as it were in a circle. Now this I afterwards found to be true; and I finally saw that the blood, forced by the action of the left ventricle into the arteries, was distributed to the body at large, and its several parts, in the same manner that it is sent through the lungs, impelled by the right ventricle into the pulmonary artery, and that then it passed through the veins and along the vena cava, and so round to the left ven- tricle. Which motion we may be allowed to call circular." Thus Harvey made known to the world the discovery which has been of the greatest value in physiological science it has revealed many things in the pathology of disease which could not otherwise have been understood, and has