the modern spirit.  To him, as to Vesalius before him, the current views of the movements of the blood were unsatisfactory, more particularly the movements of the heart and arteries, which were regarded as an active expansion by which they were filled with blood, like bellows with air.  The question of the transmission of blood through the thick septum and the transference of air and blood from the lungs to the heart were secrets which he was desirous of searching out by means of experiment.

     (27) Harvey:  Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis
     in Animalibus, Francofurti, 1628.

One or two special points in the work may be referred to as illustrating his method.  He undertook first the movements of the heart, a task so truly arduous and so full of difficulties that he was almost tempted to think with Fracastorius that “the movement of the heart was only to be comprehended by God.”  But after many difficulties he made the following statements:  first, that the heart is erected and raises itself up into an apex, and at this time strikes against the breast and the pulse is felt externally; secondly, that it is contracted every-way, but more so at the sides; and thirdly, that grasped in the hand it was felt to become harder at the time of its motion; from all of which actions Harvey drew the very natural conclusion that the activity of the heart consisted in a contraction of its fibres by which it expelled the blood from the ventricles.  These were the first four fundamental facts which really opened the way for the discovery of the circulation, as it did away with the belief that the heart in its motion attracts blood into the ventricles, stating on the contrary that by its contraction it expelled the blood and only received it during its period of repose or relaxation.  Then he proceeded to study the action of the arteries and showed that their period of diastole, or expansion, corresponded with the systole, or contraction, of the heart, and that the arterial pulse follows the force, frequency and rhythm of the ventricle and is, in fact, dependent upon it.  Here was another new fact:  that the pulsation in the arteries was nothing else than the impulse of the blood within them.  Chapter iv, in which he describes the movements of the auricles and ventricles, is a model of accurate description, to which little has since been added.  It is interesting to note that he mentions what is probably auricular fibrillation.  He says:  “After the heart had ceased pulsating an undulation or palpitation remained in the blood itself which was contained in the right auricle, this being observed so long as it was imbued with heat and spirit.”  He recognized too the importance of the auricles as the first to move and the last to die.  The accuracy and vividness of Harvey’s description of the motion of the heart have been appreciated by generations of physiologists.  Having grasped this first essential fact, that the heart was an organ