which marks the advent and accession of the
moderns to scientific power and independence.
Hitherto they had followed the ancients;
now, they dared to walk alone. Three years
afterwards, Aselli discovered the chyliferous
vessels; subsequently, Pecquet pointed out
the reservoir of the chyle, and Rudbeek and
Thomas Bartholin the lymphatic vessels—all
unknown, or very obscurely known, to the
ancients. Harvey had discovered the most
beautiful phenomenon in the animal economy,
which was beyond the reach of antiquity.
The mantel of authority fell from classic
shoulders to adorn those of the English
physician. Doctors, instead of swearing by Galen
and Aristotle, were now compelled to swear
by Harvey.

Not that the novel conquest was effected
without violent rebellions and attempts at
counter-revolution. It was regarded as a
dangerous heresy; when ridicule failed to
crush it, there was little scruple in
employing something, like persecution. Still
it was the faculty alone, and not the nation,
who showed this repugnance to a novel
truth. Molière laughed at Gui-Patin, while
Boileau satirised the faculty in general.
Harvey had no sooner published his book
on the circulation of the blood, than twenty
anatomists took up their pens to assail it.
Harvey did not answer them. Riolan, the
most learned anatomist of his time, was
the only man whom Harvey honoured with
a reply. When his enemies found they were
unable to provoke him into saying a word
in self-defence, they got tired of waging
an aggressive criticism, and allowed the
novel doctrine to spread and make its
way.

Molière's famous Chorus of Doctors, and
his other bitter jibes, were hardly a joke
or a caricature of Gui-Patin's practice; for,
starting with the laudable idea of simplifying
medical treatment, he reduced it to
the sole remedies of bleeding and purging.
A statement of what he did in that line
would be believed an exaggerated stretch
of the long-bow, if it were not extracted
from his own letters. He bled patients
at every age, infants as well as old people;
he bled a patient thirty-two times for one
and the same illness; he had himself bled
seven times for a cold; he bled his mother-
in-law, who was eighty years of age, four
times; he bled a child three days old; he
bled his own wife eight times from the veins
of her arm, and then he bled her from the
veins of her foot. She recovered, and he
exclaimed, "Bleeding for ever! " He
purged a patient, every other day, thirty-
two times; then he talks of another patient
who was bled, in all, twenty-two times
and purged forty times, "We cure many
more sick persons," says Gui-Patin, "with
a good lancet and a pound of senna, than
the Arabs could cure with their whole
pharmacopoeia of syrups and opiates." Such
a man was Harvey's most formidable adversary.

At the present day we have the means of
actually witnessing with our own eyes, the
phenomenon so furiously denied by a crowd
of learned physicians. M. Floureus,
Professor in the College of France—to whose
learned history of the discovery I am
indebted for the materials of the preceding
narrative—demonstrates the fact by a striking
experiment. In his lessons at the Jardin des
Plantes, in order to imitate, before the eyes
of his pupils, the passage of the blood from
the arteries to the veins, he opens the crural
artery and vein in the leg of a dead dog.
He inserts a pipe into the open end of the
artery, and injects water by means of a
syringe. In a very few instants, the water,
injected into the artery, returns by the vein.
It is the complete representation of the
circulation of the blood. But, by means of the
microscope, the circulation in the living
animal may be distinctly beheld. All that is
required is to select some part sufficiently
thin to allow the transmission of light through
its substance. The ear of a mouse will do,
but is inconvenient; the wing of a bat might
answer better. Or, the tail of a small fish
(such as an eel, a minnow, or a stickleback),
confined in a glass tube—or the gills of a
young newt—will serve the purpose. The
web of a frog's foot is commonly used; the
tongue of that victim reptile is vaunted as
displaying the spectacle marvellously; but,
as I pleaded in a late article, is too cruel a
mode to be adopted for the gratification of
everyday curiosity. "This method," as Dr.
Carpenter humanely observes, "is so much-
more distressing to the animal, that its
employment seems scarcely justifiable for the
mere purpose of display; and nothing but
some anticipated benefit to science can justify
the laying open the body of the living
animal, for the purpose of examining the
circulation of its lungs or mesentery." The
tail of a tadpole offers a very ready means,
and shows you the pigment-cells into the
bargain. An advantage is, that the blood-
corpuscles in the tadpole are larger than,
in the human subject. They are also oval
instead of being circular. You may trace
the red corpuscles running along the arteries,
then entering the capillaries or hair-like
vessels, which are so small and narrow that
the corpuscles can only pass one at a time—
and that, end foremost. These capillaries are
the communicating tubes, the connecting
transit from the arteries to the veins; and
you may watch the blood-discs, which have
traversed the border-land in Indian file,
returning in congregated troops to the heart,
thence to repeat their round as long as life
shall last. The camel tribe, exceptional
animals in other respects, are the only
mammal quadrupeds which have the blood-discs
oval. Of common animals, the goat has very
small corpuscles, but they are twice as large