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require more blood for this purpose, and that blood more pure and spirituous (as coming direct from the heart), than the brain, or the eye, or the heart itself.

Some there were in Harvey’s day Avho denied that the whole mass of the blood could pass through the substance of the lungs; and to these he opposes admitted facts relating to the skin, kidneys, and liver, especially the kidneys and liver, which have so dense a texture when compared with the light spongy lungs. Drink swallowed by the gallon will pass off from the body in an hour or two, and yet it must first traverse the liver and the kidneys to reach the bladder. The liver is a special case in point, for there there is no propelling power, while in the lungs there is the force of the right ventricle and the movements of respiration to help the onward course of the blood. Columbus, then, was right when he inferred from the size and structure of the pulmonary vessels, and their constant state of repletion, that there was a passage for the blood through the lungs; and Galen might be quoted to the same purport, and especially as insisting on the function of the valves of the heart and great arteries, permitting an