the right to the left side of the heart, must pass entirely through the lungs. So far, his doctrine is correct; but he also taught at the same time that the fluid which enters the aorta from the left ventricle is not blood but perfected "vital spirit" (Galen), and that it becomes genuine blood only after it has tarried for a few brief instants in the ventricular chamber and has there been subjected to some unknown influence exerted by the heart itself. This second erroneous part of Servetus' description seems to me to diminish very materially the credit to which he is otherwise entitled; and I cannot help feeling that Dezeimeris is right when he claims that Realdus Columbus, whose more perfect account of the lesser circulation was written only a little later than that of Servetus, is perhaps better entitled to the honor in question.
It is an interesting fact that Servetus introduces his disquisition on the circulation of the blood in the very midst of a treatise which bears the title "Restitution of Christianity,"—in other words, in a treatise which would never, under ordinary circumstances, be consulted by physicians in their search for information regarding an important problem in physiology like that of the circulation of the blood. In this physiologico-theological treatise Servetus, who—as I omitted to state—was a theologian as well as a physiologist, used the following expressions:—
The soul, says Holy Writ, is in the blood; as a matter of fact,
the soul is the blood. And since the soul is in the blood, one
should—if one wishes to learn how the soul is formed—endeavor
to learn how the blood is formed; and, in order to learn how the
blood is formed, it is necessary to ascertain how it moves.
(Flourens.)
I am unable to state whether it was this particular
chapter, or the work taken as a whole, which appeared to
the ecclesiastical authorities—first those of France and
afterward those of Geneva—to warrant the author's
condemnation as a heretic. And, when we are disposed to
blame severely those bigots who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, manifested such a keen desire to destroy
