Note 274 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 2)

Stubbe gives some curious information on this subject. Harvey published his Treatise at Frankfort, 1628, but Cæsalpinus’s work had appeared in 1593. Harvey adopted the notion, and more fully and perspicuously proved it. I shall give what Stubbe says. “Harvey, in his two Answers to Riolan, nowhere asserts the invention so to himself, as to deny that he had the intimation or notion from Cæsalpinus; and his silence I take for a tacit confession. His ambition of glory made him willing to be thought the author of a paradox he had so illustrated, and brought upon the stage, where it lay unregarded, and in all probability buried in oblivion; yet such was his modesty, as not to vindicate it to himself by telling a lie.”—Stubbe’s Censure, &c., p. 112.

I give this literary anecdote, as it enters into the history of most discoveries, of which the improvers, rather than the inventors, are usually the most known to the world. Bayle, who wrote much later than Stubbe, asserts the same, and has preserved the entire passage, art. Cæsalpinus. It is said Harvey is more expressly indebted to a passage in Servetus, which Wotton has given in the preface to his “Reflections on Ancient and Modern Learning,” edition 1725. The notion was probably then afloat, and each alike contributed to its development. Thus it was disputed with Copernicus, whether his great discovery of a fixed sun, and the earth wheeling round that star, was his own; others had certainly observed it; yet the invention was still Copernican: for that great genius alone corrected, extended, and gave perfection to a hint, till it expanded to a system.

So gradual have often been the great inventions of genius. What others conjectured, and some discovered, Harvey demonstrated. The fate of Harvey’s discovery is a curious instance of that patience and fortitude which genius must too often exert in respect to itself. Though Harvey lived to his eightieth year, he hardly witnessed his great discovery established before he died; and it has been said, that he was the only one of his contemporaries who lived to see it in some repute. No physician adopted it; and when it got into vogue, they then disputed whether he was the inventor! Sir William Temple denied not only the discovery, but the doctrine of the Circulation of the Blood. “Sense can hardly allow it; which,” says he, “in this dispute must be satisfied as well as reason, before mankind will concur.”