1628).

Now then we may come to Harvey himself. When you read Harvey's
treatise, which is one of the most remarkable scientific monographs
with which I am acquainted--it occupies between 50 and 60 pages of a
small quarto in Latin, and is as terse and concise as it possibly can
be--when you come to look at Harvey's work, you will find that he had
long struggled with the difficulties of the accepted doctrine of the
circulation. He had received from Fabricius, and from all the great
authorities of the day, the current view of the circulation of the
blood. But he was a man with that rarest of all
qualities--intellectual honesty; and by dint of cultivating that great
faculty, which is more moral than intellectual, it had become impossible
for him to say he believed anything which he did not clearly believe.
This is a most uncomfortable peculiarity--for it gets you into all
sorts of difficulties with all sorts of people--but, for scientific
purposes, it is absolutely invaluable. Harvey possessed this
peculiarity in the highest degree, and so it was impossible for him to
accept what all the authorities told him, and he looked into the matter
for himself. But he was not hasty. He worked at his new views, and he
lectured about them at the College of Physicians for nine years; he did
not print them until he was a man of fifty years of age; and when he
did print them he accompanied them with a demonstration which has never
been shaken, and which will stand till the end of time. What Harvey
proved, in short, was this (see Fig. 4)--that everybody had made a
mistake, for want of sufficiently accurate experimentation as to the
actual existence of the fact which everybody assumed. To anybody who
looks at the blood-vessels with an unprejudiced eye it seems so natural
that the blood should all come out of the liver, and be distributed by
the veins to the different parts of the body, that nothing can seem