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after point, until all was clear as sunshine in midsummer. Nor had it been anticipated. Harvey himself states quite candidly and truthfully how opinions stood before he published in this College his evidence on the motion of the blood. Men for years had perplexed themselves about this problem. Now one guess, now another, may have hovered for a moment near the truth; but, as Dr. Rolleston has so well shown in a former Harveian oration, there cannot be for a moment a doubt of the entire originality of Harvey. As he claimed for himself, so we can most justly claim for him that he “was the partisan of truth alone,” and truth would have been shamed if he had robbed the least of his predecessors of a single grain of the discovery.
What, now, was the intellectual calibre and tendency of Harvey’s mind as far as we can judge of it from his works? He appears to me to have had in a marked degree what is sometimes called the “scientific mind.” But this term is not, I think, a good one.
