The appearance of Harvey’s book on the Motion of the Heart and Blood seems almost immediately to have attracted the attention of all the better intellects among the medical men of Europe. The subject was not one, indeed, greatly calculated to interest the mass of mere practitioners; had it been a book of receipts it would have had a better chance with them; but the anatomists and physiologists and scientific physicians would seem at once to have taken it up and canvassed its merits. The conclusions come to in the work, there can be no question, took the medical world by surprise; it was not prepared for such a proposition as a ceaseless circular movement of the blood, with the heart for the propelling organ; for the latter point, be it understood, was even as great a novelty as the former. Coming unexpectedly, and differing so widely from the ancient and accepted notions, we cannot wonder that Harvey’s views were at first rejected almost universally. The older intellects, in possession of the seats and places of authority, regarded them as idle dreams; and upon the faith of this conclusion, their author was set down and treated by the vulgar as a crackbrained innovator. Two years, however, elapsed before aught in contravention of the new doctrines saw the light, and this came at length not from any of the more mature anatomists of Europe--their minds were made up, the thing was absurd--but from a young physician, of the name of Primerose, of Scottish descent, but French by birth. Primerose had been a pupil of Joannes Riolanus, professor of anatomy in the University of Paris; he had doubtless listened to his master’s demonstration of the absurdity of the Harveian doctrine of the circulation, and by and by he set himself down, by way apparently of exercising his ingenuity, to try the question, not by fact and experiment, but by the precepts he had imbibed from his teacher and the texts of the ancients. The essay of Primerose[30] may be regarded as a defence of the physiological ideas of Galen against the innovations of Harvey. It is remarkable for any characteristic rather than that of a candid spirit in pursuit of truth; it abounds in obstinate denials, and sometimes in what may be termed dishonest perversions of simple matters of fact, and in its whole course appeals not once to experiment as a means of investigation.--Harvey, having already, and in the very outset of his work, demonstrated the notions untenable which it was Primerose’s purpose to reassert and defend, of course deigned him no reply; he could never dream of going over the barren ground he had already trodden, in the hope of convincing such an antagonist.