arning that
he succeeded his master in the chair of anatomy of Padua.

Van den Spieghel, or Spigelius, as he called himself in accordance with
the fashion of those days, died comparatively young, in 1625, and his
work was edited by his friend Daniel Bucretius, whose preface is dated
1627. The accounts of the heart and vessels, and of the motion of the
blood, which it contains, are full and clear; but, beyond matters of
detail, they go beyond Galen in only two points; and with respect to one
of these, Spigelius was in error.

The first point is the "pulmonary circulation," which is taught as
Realdus Columbus taught it nearly eighty years before. The second point
is, so far as I know, peculiar to Spigelius himself. He thinks that the
pulsation of the arteries has an effect in promoting the motion of the
blood contained in the veins which accompany them. Of the true course of
the blood as a whole, Spigelius has no more suspicion than had any other
physiologist of that age, except William Harvey; no rumor of whose
lectures at the College of Physicians, commenced six years before
Spieghel's death, was likely in those days of slow communication and in
the absence of periodical publications to have reached Italy.

Now, let anyone familiar with the pages of Spigelius take up Harvey's
treatise and mark the contrast.

The main object of the _Exercitatio_ is to put forth and demonstrate by
direct experimental and other accessory evidence a proposition which is
far from being hinted at either by Spigelius or by any of his
contemporaries or predecessors, and which is in diametrical
contradiction to the views respecting the course of the blood in the
veins which are expounded in their works.

From Galen to Spigelius, they one and all believed that the blood in the
vena cava and its branches flows from the main trunk toward the smaller
ramifications. There is a similar consensus in the doctrine that the
greater part, if not the whole, of the blood thus distributed by the
veins is derived from the liver; in which organ it is generated out of
the materials brought from the alimentary canal by means of the vena
portae. And all Harvey's predecessors further agree in the belief that
only a small fraction of the total mass of the venous blood is conveyed
by the vena arteriosa to the lungs and passes by the arteria venosa to
the left ventricle, thence to be distributed over the body by the
arteries. Whether some portion of the refined a