Circe. In physics, terrestrial and celestial, Galileo, persecuted as he was, had some current with him and before him; Copernicus had preceded him, Kepler was beside him: but in physiology the waters had closed upon the path of Galen as upon the wake of a great ship; the anatomists, themselves galenists, had given IIarvey little help; and the share of Scr- vetus', Colombo, and Fabricius was but small in the discovery of the central fact of the science, and of the method which opened the way to Pecquet and Aselli, to Glisson, to Steno, to Wharton and Willis, to Haller and Bernard. Harvey's discovery was the first step to a transfiguration of medicine; and though after Harvey there arose much false physiology and therewith again great floods of medical sophistry, yet from his time medicine has had to reckon with physiology, the only source of scientific nosology and therapeutics.
We celebrate the memory of great men in the certain hope that in their children they will be born again.
1 "The share of Servetus was small"; that is, the effect of his remarkable discovery was small, for it was buried in a theological work of which but a few copies were rescued from the burning; namely "Christianismi restitutio. Vienna Allo- brogum, 1553." (Haeser gives the reference to pp. 170-177, De Trinitate divina.) The work was reprinted at Nuremberg in 1790.
