before they could perform any function.  The heart, ready furnished with its proper organs of motion, like a kind of internal creature, existed before the body.  The first to be formed, nature willed that it should afterwards fashion, nourish, preserve, complete the entire animal, as its work and dwelling-place:  and as the prince in a kingdom, in whose hands lie the chief and highest authority, rules over all, the heart is the source and foundation from which all power is derived, on which all power depends in the animal body.

Many things having reference to the arteries farther illustrate and confirm this truth.  Why does not the pulmonary vein pulsate, seeing that it is numbered among the arteries?  Or wherefore is there a pulse in the pulmonary artery?  Because the pulse of the arteries is derived from the impulse of the blood.  Why does an artery differ so much from a vein in the thickness and strength of its coats?  Because it sustains the shock of the impelling heart and streaming blood.  Hence, as perfect nature does nothing in vain, and suffices under all circumstances, we find that the nearer the arteries are to the heart, the more do they differ from the veins in structure; here they are both stronger and more ligamentous, whilst in extreme parts of the body, such as the feet and hands, the brain, the mesentery, and the testicles, the two orders of vessels are so much alike that it is impossible to distinguish between them with the eye.  Now this is for the following very sufficient reasons:  the more remote the vessels are from the heart, with so much the less force are they distended by the stroke of the heart, which is broken by the great distance at which it is given.  Add to this that the impulse of the heart exerted upon the mass of blood, which must needs fill the trunks and branches of the arteries, is diverted, divided, as it were, and diminished at every subdivision, so that the ultimate capillary divisions of the arteries look like veins, and this not merely in constitution, but in function.  They have either no perceptible pulse, or they rarely exhibit one, and never except where the heart beats more violently than usual, or at a part where the minute vessel is more dilated or open than elsewhere.  It, therefore, happens that at times we are aware of a pulse in the teeth, in inflammatory tumours, and in the fingers; at another time we feel nothing of the sort.  By this single symptom I have ascertained for certain that young persons whose pulses are naturally rapid were labouring under fever; and in like manner, on compressing the fingers in youthful and delicate subjects during a febrile paroxysm, I have readily perceived the pulse there.  On the other hand, when the heart pulsates more languidly, it is often impossible to feel the pulse not merely in the fingers, but the wrist, and even at the temple, as in persons afflicted with lipothymiae asphyxia, or hysterical symptoms, and in the debilitated and moribund.