Vesalius opened up the way for Physiological enquiry by his exact anatomical labours ... and his successors did little more than widen the way which he had opened up. Harvey was the first who followed up the anatomical path till it led to a great physiological truth. . . . He made no appeal to any knowledge or to any conceptions outside the facts of anatomy and the results of experiments. . . . The patient examination of anatomical features, if possible a comparison of those features in the same organ or part in more animals than one, the laying hold of some explanation of the purpose of those features suggested by the features themselves, and the devising of experiments by vivisection or otherwise which should test the validity of that explanation, that was Harvey's threefold method."[1]
I propose to consider how far the ascertainment of the facts of structure as a necessary preliminary or adjunct to experimental methods has influenced the progress of biological knowledge, and what may be the limitations and extensions of the subject in that direction. But I would guard myself at the same time from being supposed to assume that anatomy however
- ↑ Lectures on the History of Physiology during the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, by Sir M. Foster, K.C.B., M.D., D.C.L., Sec. R.S., 1901.
