Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu/71

or in the words of a poet of another country, and a later age,

I do not wish to assert that Harvey was wholly independent of the works of his predecessors; he himself would, as his repeated references to them show, have been the very last man to make any such claim for himself; nor would I say that he owed nothing to the times—

in which he lived. It is true, I think, in science, as it is also true in morals and politics, that the times make great men as much as great men make the times. Many metaphors have been used to express this latter half-truth. Such is the metaphor, an acquaintance with which I owe to Mr. Picton's new and striking work The Mystery of Matter, p. 265, used by St. Augustine, in which great men are compared to great mountains, dwelling apart in loneliness, and sending floods of blessings down upon the little hills and plains at their feet. Such,