accessible to him at that day. And so it came about, that, although he
examined the course of the blood in many of the lower animals--watched
the pulsation of the heart in shrimps, and animals of that kind--he
never could put the final coping-stone on his edifice. He did not know
to the day of his death, although quite clear about the fact that the
arteries and the veins do communicate, how it is that they
communicate--how it was that the blood of the arteries passed into the
veins. One is grieved to think that the grand old man should have gone
down to his tomb without the vast satisfaction it would have given to
him to see what the Italian naturalist Malpighi showed only seven years
later, in 1664, when he demonstrated, in a living frog, the actual
passage of the blood from the ultimate ramifications of the arteries
into the veins. But that absolute ocular demonstration of the truth of
the views he had maintained throughout his life it was not granted to
Harvey to see. What he did experience was this: that on the
publication of his doctrines, they were met with the greatest possible
opposition; and I have no doubt savage things were uttered in those old
controversies, and that a great many people said that these new-fangled
doctrines, reducing living processes to mere mechanism, would sap the
foundations of religion and morality. I do not know for certain that
they did, but they said things very like it. The first point was to
show that Harvey's views were absolutely untrue; and not being able to
succeed in that, opponents said they were not new; and not being able
to succeed in that, that they didn't matter. That is the usual course
with all new discoveries. But Harvey troubled himself very little
about these things. He remained perfectly quiet; for although reputed
a hot-tempered man, he never would have anything to do with controversy
if he could help it; and he only replied to one of his antagonists
after twenty years' interval, and then in the most charming spirit of
candour and moderation. But he had the great satisfaction of living to