Page:The Harveian oration, 1875 (IA b22314611).pdf/15

himself to discover the circulation of the blood; and such industry and patience he continued to display to the end of his long life. For it should be well understood, and constantly borne in mind, that the discovery of the circulation was not a something that lay on the surface, and which any man of common discernment might pick up and appropriate. It was not like a new remedy which, having come into repute among the common people, waited only for some patient and intelligent collector of facts to affix to it the stamp of authority. It was not such a discovery as John Woodall made, when he inferred the efficacy of lemon-juice, as others since his day have done oforanges, or fruits, or vegetables, or even of a mixed diet, from the happy accident of two ships crews, oue smitten with scurvy, the other free from it, differing in the possession of the one article of diet, and in nothing else. Nor was it a mere simple and natural inference from occurrences numerous and uniform, as was the severity of the natural small-pox, and the mildness of the inoculated form of it, as all the world of Constantinople saw them, when Lady Montague made herself the organ and interpreter of a universal belief. It was not even