Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu/77

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71 Of Harvey's, as of Berkeley's sojourn in Oxford, we know little; little, indeed, has the Sloane MSS. (now marked Sloane MS. 3972 A), there is this entry on p. 57 : — "C. "ff^y". — Praelectiones anatomicae universales per me, Gulielmum Harveum medicum Londinensem Anatom. et Chirurg. Professor. Anno Dom. 16 16, aetatis 37, praelect. April i, 1 61 7." To which is added, " This is the author's foundation and first Lecture of the circulation in his own handwriting," and opposite to it is this note by Sir F. Madden, " In the place of 230 (which seems missing) Ayscough substituted the bracketed no. (6)." So you will see from this that the MS. was missing in Ayscough's time. I have ran- sacked our MSS. without finding any clue; so I think you may make up your mind that it was borrowed, and has gone the way of borrowed books in general. — E. Maude Thompson/ Wood says (Fasti Oxonienses, ii. 6) of Harvey, ' But more in MSS. hath he left behind him, the titles of which you may see in the Epist. Dedicat. before a Historical Account of the Colleges Proceedings against Empyricks' (1684, London, Ch. Goodall). Moved by this authority, though Goodall only says that Harvey designed these treatises, I looked over a large number of medical MSS., assisted herein by Mr. Walter de Gray Birch, in the Sloane Collection of the British Museum, without the desired result. Subsequently I found that Harvey himself in 1650 (p. 163 and p. 502, ed. 1766; p. 148 and pp. 481, 482, ed. Willis) had recorded the loss of his 'adversaria multorum annorum laboribus parta,' and especially of his work De Generatione Insectorum, when his house was plundered in the Civil War. Later