Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/42

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xxxviii
THE LIFE OF HARVEY.

Having thus accompanied Harvey over so much of the way in his mortal career, let us, before proceeding further, briefly advert to his Writings, to the influence they had in the republic of letters during his life-time, to the fruits they have since produced, and to the impression still made on the mind that holds communion through their means with the mind that dictated them so many years ago.—The intellectual endowment of a man necessarily appears in his writings; it is not always from them that so true a conception of his moral character can be formed. Harvey, however, though in his long life he accomplished but a small fraction of all his literary designs, has still left us sufficient from which to form an estimate of him as a philosopher, as a physiologist, and it