Page:The Harveian oration, 1875 (IA b22314611).pdf/50

faculties fail him there. He is not only obscure but inconsistent, reproving in others what he allows in himself; over and over again speaking of occult forces as being of the essence of the stars, and yet objecting to other men that “they bring gods upon the scene” that they “encumber philosophy with fanciful conceits” and derive from the stars what is produced at home. Sometimes too, but, it must be confessed not often, Harvey seems to promote to the place of a personal God, whose existence, and attributes, as Creator and Preserver, he humbly recognises, some mysterious impersonal force. Harvey has also been accused of credulity in accepting the evidence of an eye-witness (an intimate friend) respecting the existence in Borneo of a race of human beings with tails; and in attributing the-dispersion of certain tumours to the application of a dead man's hand. Our authority for this last statement is Robert Boyle, who says that Harvey told him he had sometimes tried this strange remedy “ fruitlessly, but often with good success." It is to Boyle, too, that we are indebted for the information, derived, as he tells us, from Harvey himself, that his dissection of the valves of the veins led him to the discovery of the cir-