Wood speaks of Harvey as the surmiser of the little world, to distinguish him from another Englishman who first went about the greater world. But a greater than both—Isaac Newton—had grasped the secret of a cosmic circulation, and brooded in silence over the motion of the spheres for more than twenty years before publishing the Principia. Between the writing of the rough sketch in 1842 and the appearance of the Origin of Species seventeen years elapsed ; and from the date of the journal notes, 1836, in which we have the first intimation of Darwin’s theory, more than twenty years. In Harvey’s case this intellectual reticence, this hesitation ‘to quit the peaceful haven’, as he says, has cost us dear. Only a happy accident gave us the De Generatione, and the College can never be too grateful to Sir George Ent for that Christmas visit, 1650, so graphically described, and to which we owe one of the masterpieces of English medicine. How many seventeenth-century treatises we could have spared to have had the Practice of Medicine conformable to his Thesis of the Circulation of the Blood! How instructive his prospective Medical Observations would have been we can gather from the remarkable series of cases scattered through the manuscript notes and his published writings. His ‘treatise apart’ on Eventilation or Respiration; the Medical Anatomy, or Anatomy in its Application to Medicine, as he says, ‘I also intend putting to press’; the work ‘from observations in my possession’ on Organs of Motion in Animals—all of these, with the work on Generation in Insects, and others mentioned by Dr. Merrett,[1] the then library keeper, 1667, were probably dispersed when those sons of Belial ransacked his chambers at Whitehall.
- ↑ Munk, Roll of the College, vol. i, p, 132.
