Add to this the patent fact that the antique allusions in the plays "have not regard to what we may call 'school classics,' but to authors seldom perused but by profound scholars" * even to-day: and technical exploration, however far it proceeds beyond this in the Shakespearean text, can bring evidence only cumulative as to the result already obtained. But, if we pass from the technical structure to the material of the plays, we are confronted with the still more amazing discovery that, not only the lore of the past was at the service of their author, but that he had no less an access to secrets supposed to be locked in the very womb of Time, the discoveries of which, in the as yet distant future, were to immortalize their first _sponsors_. * Smith, p. 85. ** Though not, perhaps, universally now-a-days. The late John Elliotson declared that the circulation through the lungs had certainly been taught seventy years previously by Servetus, who was burned at the stake in 1553. Dr. Robert Willis asserts, in his "Life of Harvey," that the facts he used were familiarly known to most of his predecessors for a century previous. Izaak Walton states that Harvey got the idea of circulation from Walter Warner, the mathematician; and that eminent physician, John Hunter, remarks that Servetus first, and Realdus Columbus afterward, clearly announced the circulation of the blood through the lungs; and Cisalpinus, many years before Harvey, published, in three different works, all that was wanting in Servetus to make the circulation complete. Wotton says that Servetus was the first, as far as he could learn, who had a distinct idea of this matter. Even the Chinese were impressed with this truth some four thousand years before Europeans dreamed of it. Plato affirmed--"the heart being the knot of the veins, and the fountain from whence the blood arises and briskly circulates through all the members." This, however, rather adds to than lessens the strength of the argument drawn from finding the "discovery" in the plays. For example, Dr. Harvey does not announce--what is credited to him *--his discovery of the circulation of {209}the blood in the human system--until 1619 (his book was not published until 1628), three years after William Shakespeare's death. But why need Dr. Harvey have resorted to vivisection to make his "discovery"? He need only have taken down his "Shakespeare." Is there any thing in Dr. Harvey any more exactly definite than the following?= ```"I send it through the rivers of your blood, ```Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain, ```And, through the cranks and offices of man: ```The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins, ```From me receive that natural competency ```Whereby they live." `````-- _Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 1_.= ```"... had baked thy blood, and made it heavy-thick