WILLIAM HARVEY 173 upon his eldest son; and the greater part of it was eventually bequeathed by him to the college at which he was educated. At ten years of age he commenced his studies at the grammar school in Can- terbury ; and upon May 31, 1593, soon after the com- pletion of his fifteenth year, was admitted as a pen- sioner at Caius College, Cambridge. At that time a familiar acquaintance with logic and the Isarned languages was indispensable as a first step in the prosecution of all the branches of science, especially of medicine ; and the skill with which Har- vey avails himself of the scholastic form of reasoning in his great work on the Circulation, with the elegant Latin style of all his writings, particularly of his latest work on the Generation of Animals, affords a suffi- cient proof of his diligence in the prosecution of these preliminary studies during the next four years which he spent at Cambridge. The two next were occupied in visiting the principal cities and seminaries of the Continent. He then prepared to address himself to those investigations to which the rest of his life was devoted ; and the scene of his introduction to them could not have been better chosen than at the University of Padua, where he be- came a student in his twenty-second year. The ancient physicians gathered what they knew of anatomy from inaccurate dissections of the lower animals, and the slender knowledge thus acquired, how- ever inadequate to unfold the complicated functions of the human frame, was abundantly sufficient as a basis for conjecture, of which they took full advantage. With them everything became easy to explain, precisely because nothing was un- derstood ; and the nature and treatment of disease, the great object of medicine, and its subsidiary sciences, was hardily abandoned to the conduct of the imagina- tion, and sought for literally among the stars. Nevertheless, so firmly was their authority established, that even down to the close of the sixteenth century the naturalists of Europe still continued to derive all their physiology, and the greater part of their anatomy and medicine, from the works of Aristotle and Galen, read not in the original Greek, but re-translated into Latin from the interpolated ver- sions of the Arabian physicians. The opinions entertained by these dictators in the republic of letters, and consequently by their submissive followers, with re- gard to the structure and functions of the organs concerned in the circulation, were particularly fanciful and confused ; so much so that it would be no easy task to give an intelligible account of them that would not be tedious from its length. It will be enough to say, that a scarcely more oppressive mass of mischievous er- ror was cleared away from the science of astronomy by the discovery of Newton, than that from which physiology was disencumbered by the discovery of Harvey. But though the work was completed by an Englishman, it is to Italy that, in anatomy, as in most of the sciences, we owe the first attempts to cast off the
