anguage of the learned in the Middle Ages, in that way;
but, by the study of the classical languages, the original text became
accessible to the men who were then endeavouring to learn for themselves
something about the facts of nature. It was a century or more before
these men, finding themselves in the presence of a master--finding that
all their lives were occupied in attempting to ascertain for themselves
that which was familiar to him--I say it took the best part of a hundred
years before they could fairly see that their business was not to follow
him, but to follow his example--namely, to look into the facts of nature
for themselves, and to carry on, in his spirit, the work he had begun.
That was first done by Vesalius, one of the greatest anatomists who ever
lived; but his work does not specially bear upon the question we are
now concerned with. So far as regards the motions of the heart and the
course of the blood, the first man in the Middle Ages, and indeed the
only man who did anything which was of real importance, was one Realdus
Columbus, who was professor at Padua in the year 1559, and published a
great anatomical treatise. What Realdus Columbus did was this; once
more resorting to the method of Galen, turning to the living animal,
experimenting, he came upon new facts, and one of these new facts was
that there was not merely a subordinate communication between the blood
of the right side of the heart and that of the left side of the heart,
through the lungs, but that there was a constant steady current of
blood, setting through the pulmonary artery on the right side, through
the lungs, and back by the pulmonary veins to the left side of the heart
(Figure 3). Such was the capital discovery and demonstration of Realdus
Columbus. He is the man who discovered what is loosely called the
'pulmonary circulation'; and it really is quite absurd, in the face of
the fact, that twenty years afterwards we find Ambrose Pare, the great
French surgeon, ascribing this discovery to him as a matter of common
notoriety, to find that attempts are made to give the credit of it to
other people. So far as I know, this discovery of the course of the
blood through the lungs, which is called the pulmonary circulation, is
the one step in real advance that was made between the time of Galen
and the time of Harvey. And I would beg you to note that the word
"circulation" is improperly employed when it is applied to the course of
the bloo