As we read these words, published in Harvey's old age, we recollect the following words, written in his note-book more than thirty-three years before, viz.: "So there is cooling and ventilation of the native heat, ventilation especially."[87] We may recall also that the preservation of the native heat had sufficed to explain respiration to Harvey's ancient teacher, Aristotle, while the tenor of Aristotle's genuine works well accords with the following dictum which we have found in Harvey's note-book: "Spirits not from air." Yet the more firmly this dictum was upheld, and the more simply Aristotelian in principle did Harvey's doctrine of respiration remain, so much the less called for must have seemed that swift and endlessly repeated passage through the lungs of the whole mass of the blood, which was involved in the Harveian circulation. In the actual phenomena of respiration, however, positive obstacles confronted the doctrine of the circulation which were harder to surmount than cobwebs of speculation, or than the mere question "_cui bono_" which latter the steadfast observer could simply wave aside. Spirits or no spirits, there were opponents of the circulation, even in Harvey's old age, who insisted that the blood in the arteries was so different from the blood in the veins that the same blood could not be changing perpetually from arterial to venous, and _vice versa_. There was always that stubborn difference of color, plainly to be seen in man and beast, but so hard to account for in Harvey's day. Therefore, we find Harvey leaving the realm of subtleties and taking up his old weapon of demonstration, in order to minimize the differences between arterial and venous blood. Twenty years after the publication of his discovery he says to Riolanus:--