"But since the divine man concedes, as he often does in that same place, 'that all the arteries of the body arise from the great artery, and this from the heart; and that for a certainty blood is naturally contained and borne onward in all of them,' he maintaining 'that the three sigmoid valves placed at the orifice of the aorta forbid the return of blood into the heart, and that nature would never have set these valves in apposition to the most preëminent of the viscera were the valves not to do it some most important service;'--since, I say, the father of physicians concedes all this and in these very words, as he does in the book aforesaid, I do not see how he can deny that the great artery is the vessel adapted to distribute the blood, now arrived at complete perfection, from the heart to the body at large."[153] Thus does the great English discoverer bring the pulmonary transit and the circulation of the blood to the rescue of the Aristotelian heart, despite Galen and the tricuspid valve! Between Harvey and the school that refused to the heart more than a fraction of the blood, there could be no peace. It is the Galenists whose system he attacked and shattered so thoroughly; and those who long and bitterly opposed the acceptance of the Harveian circulation were of the Galenic school. In a private letter written twenty-three years after the publication of his discovery, Harvey excuses the French physician Riolanus for having slighted the circulation not long before, saying, among other things:-- "It was proper that the dean of the College of Paris should keep the medicine of Galen in repair; and should admit no novelties into his school without the utmost winnowing."[154] CHAPTER VI THE CIRCULATION AND THE PRIMACY OF THE BLOOD