appropriate motto for the period— laudamus veteres : sed nostris utimur annis. But even so late as 1671 the old views were maintained in the English edition of Riolan. And yet the knowledge of Harvey’s views must have spread broadcast, not only in the profession, but in that large outside circle of distinguished men who felt the new spirit of science working in their veins. From converse or from the Lumleian lectures, which no doubt he often attended, Kenelm Digby must have had the information about Harvey’s views on generation, as at the date of the issue of his Two Treatises, 1644, they had not been published anywhere. While he knew well the motion of the blood as expounded by Harvey, and having, in making his great antidote, studied the action of the viper’s heart, Digby, like Descartes, could not emancipate himself from the old views, as shown in the following passage : ‘But if you desire to follow the blood all along every steppe, in its progresse from the hart round about the body, till it returne back againe to its center, Doctor Harvey, who most acutely teacheth this doctrine, must be your guide. He will show you how it issueth from the hart by the arteries; from whence it goeth on warming the flesh, untill it arrive to some of the extremities of the body : and by then it is grown so coole (by long absence from the fountaine of its heate; and by evaporating its owne stocke of spirits, without any new supply) that it hath need of being warmed anew; it findeth itself returned backe againe to the hart, and is there heated againe, which returne is made by the veines, as its going forwardes, is performed only by the arteries.’
Sir William Temple well expresses the attitude of mind of the intellectual Philistine of the time, who looked for immediate results. Speaking of the work of Harvey and of Copernicus he says : 'Whether either of
