If the man who discovered a new material world deserves immortality, equally meritorious is he who revealed a new world of activity, and promulgated the first true conception of the ceaseless round of vital processes. As Dr. Parkes says in his Harveian Oration, 1876, “When any one examines into this discovery of Harvey’s, and gradually recognises its extraordinary importance, he cannot but be seized with an urgent wish to know how the mind which solved so great a problem was constituted; how it worked and how it reached, not merely the probability, but the certainty, of a grand natural law.... There was no accident about it—no help from what we call chance; it was worked out and thought out, point after point, until all was clear as sunshine in midsummer. Nor had it been anticipated.” WILLIAM HARVEY, eldest son of Thomas Harvey and Joan Halke, was born at Folkestone in Kent, on the 1st of April, 1578, and that his parents were in easy circumstances may be judged by the fact that five of his brothers became substantial London merchants. Of his mother it is recorded on her monumental tablet that she was “a careful, tender-hearted mother, dear to her husband, reverenced of her children, beloved of her neighbours.” Her eldest son, after some years’ education at Canterbury, was entered at Gonville and Caius College in 1593, where he remained till 1597, when he left the university with the B.A. degree, and betook himself to Padua. This renowned university then boasted among its professors Fabricius, the anatomist, whose influence upon Harvey was evidently remarkable. After five years, Harvey obtained his doctorate in medicine, couched in terms of the utmost praise of his astonishing ability, memory, and knowledge, and returned to England. He was admitted to the same degree at Cambridge, and settled in practice in London, marrying the daughter of Dr. Launcelot Browne in his twenty-sixth year—a union which proved childless. Having become a candidate for the Fellowship of the College of Physicians in 1604, he was admitted in 1607 after due probation; and we find him in 1609 seeking the reversion of the physiciancy to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, gaining the king’s letters recommendatory, and producing such testimonials from the President of the College of Physicians and others that he was chosen before the vacancy occurred, and on the death of Dr. Wilkinson was appointed to the office, October 14, 1609.