Page:The rise of physiology in England - the Harveian oration delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, October 18th, 1895 (IA b24974778).pdf/72

 and primary cause of such movements. What microscope, however exquisitely elaborate, shall make visible those minute pores by which, for example, the chyle passes from the intestines to the chyliferous vessels? Or what microscope shall exhibit those ducts through which the blood, conducted by the arteries, is passed onward to the orifices of the veins? These, and others innumerable, others more beautifully wrought, are but a small portion of the pores and passages of the wondrous fabric of the human body, a fabric which the wisest has not even seen in a dream. All our knowledge—I speak respectfully—all our knowledge is gross and rough, dealing only with the outer husk of the things that we would know, ascertaining only, at its highest level, how things are, but by no means grasping why they are so."

From this passage it seems that he either did not know of Malpighi's demonstrations of the circulation in the lung and bladder of the frog in 1661, or those of Mr. Wm. Molyneux made before the Royal Society of the circulation in the newt, and published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1683, vol. xv, p. 1236, the same year in which Sydenham published his Tractatus de Hydrope, or that he did not attach the importance to them which they deserved.

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