tion of any anatomist of those
days, and he followed the course which is usually adopted by the men of
temporary notoriety toward those of enduring fame. According to Riolan,
Harvey's theory of the circulation was not true; and besides that, it
was not new; and, furthermore, he invented a mongrel doctrine of his
own, composed of the old views with as much of Harvey's as it was safe
to borrow, and tried therewith to fish credit for himself out of the
business. In fact, in wading through these forgotten controversies, I
felt myself quite at home. Substitute the name of Darwin for that of
Harvey, and the truth that history repeats itself will come home to the
dullest apprehension. It was said of the doctrine of the circulation of
the blood that nobody over forty could be got to adopt it; and I think I
remember a passage in the _Origin of Species_ to the effect that its
author expects to convert only young and flexible minds.

There is another curious point of resemblance in the fact that even
those who gave Harvey their general approbation and support sometimes
failed to apprehend the value of some of those parts of his doctrine
which are, indeed, merely auxiliary to the theory of the circulation,
but are only a little less important than it. Harvey's great friend and
champion, Sir George Ent, is in this case; and I am sorry to be obliged
to admit that Descartes falls under the same reprehension.

This great philosopher, mathematician, and physiologist, whose
conception of the phenomena of life as the results of mechanism is now
playing as great a part in physiological science as Harvey's own
discovery, never fails to speak with admiration, as Harvey gratefully
acknowledges, of the new theory of the circulation. And it is
astonishing--I had almost said humiliating--to find that even he is
unable to grasp Harvey's profoundly true view of the nature of the
systole and the diastole, or to see the force of the quantitative
argument. He adduces experimental evidence against the former position,
and is even further from the truth than Galen was, in his ideas of the
physical cause of the circulation.

Yet one more parallel with Darwin. In spite of all opposition, the
doctrine of the circulation propounded by Harvey was, in its essential
features, universally adopted within thirty years of the time of its
publication. Harvey's friend, Thomas Hobbes, remarked that he was the
only man, in his experience, who had the good-fortune t