great work on " Animal Generation," of which he was so diffident, and which was, as it were, dragged from him by his admiring friend, Sir George Ent, for the purpose of publication, would by itself have raised him to the first rank of biologists, although, as Wilhs remarks, to complete and perfect such a task as this was impossible, even for Harvey, with the means at his disposal in the seventeenth century.
His minor treatises show, equally with his greater ones, the same originality and intellectual power.
But I will not dilate on these topics. They have been often discussed before us here. I have preferred on this occasion rather to present to you the pre- eminent qualities of the mind and character of Harvey, and to indicate the wholesome lessons which they afford for us. Harvey, himself, best summed up his great characteristic and guiding principle in a concise sentence that might even now be fitly inscribed on his sarcophagus, and it is this:— "I avow myself the partisan of truth alone." That was the great moral of his life — truth eternal, ever to be sought for, to be held, and to be passed on. Let us ask ourselves if the Orator of 1998 will be able to say that such was our ideal in this College at the close of the preceding century? We may fairly hope that he will not hesitate so to speak of us.
51
