Page:The Harveian oration, 1875 (IA b22314611).pdf/16

so simple a matter as Jenner had to deal with when he (more observant, more logical, more persevering than his neighbours and with the precedent of inoculation to help him), converted the neglected gossip of the dairy into a life-preserving principle; or (to give but one other example), the discovery of the circulation was not such a simple correction of ancient and authoritative error as Ambrose Paré made when, with a mind prepared by a wholesome scepticism, he found the soldiers wounded by gunshot, and treated by the orthodox method of boiling oil, suffering pain and inflammation, from which those he had been forced, by lack of material, to dress with a cold slimy mixture, were comparatively free.

Harvey’s work was of a different order. It demanded observations and experiments of a novel kind, and a keen, penetrating, refined logic to bring it to perfection. As we think of what it was, we are forcibly reminded of the modern researches of Sir Charles Bell, and at the same time of that famous Essay on Dew, by Dr. Wells, to which logicians accord such high praise, or that other not less remarkable inquiry by which Sir George Baker, a former President of this College, com-