"And if not yet convinced he shall still insist, that when an artery is divided, a preternatural route is, as it were, opened, and that so the blood escapes in torrents, but that the same thing does not happen in the healthy and uninjured body when no outlet is made ... it may be answered, that ... in serpents and several fish by tying the veins some way below the heart, you will perceive a space between the ligature and the heart speedily to become empty, so that unless you would deny the evidence of your senses, you must needs admit the return of the blood to the heart.... If, on the contrary, the artery instead of the vein be compressed or tied, you will observe the part between the obstacle and the heart and the heart itself to become inordinately distended, to assume a deep purple or even livid colour, and at length to be so much oppressed with blood that you will believe it about to be choked; but the obstacle removed, all things immediately return to their natural state in colour, size, and impulse." Harvey next proceeds to demonstrate his second proposition. He shows that the blood enters a limb by the arteries and leaves it by the veins; that the arteries are the vessels carrying the blood from the heart, and the veins the returning channels of the blood to the heart; that in the limbs and the extreme parts of the body the blood passes either immediately by anastomosis or mediately by the pores of the flesh. Harvey is here hampered by the conditions of the age in which he lived, yet it is here that he shows himself far superior to his contemporaries as well as to the most enlightened of his predecessors. His lens was not sufficiently powerful to show him the capillary blood-vessels, and he had therefore no real knowledge of the way by which the blood passed from the arterioles into the venules. On the other hand, he did not repeat the mistake made by Aristotle, and reiterated by Cesalpino in 1571 that the blood passed from the smallest arteries into "capillamenta," the [Greek: neura] of Aristotle. Later commentators have given to Cesalpino the credit due to Harvey by translating "capillamenta" into our term capillaries. But this process of "reading into" the writings of man what he never knew is one of the commonest pitfalls of defective scholarship. Harvey attempted to solve the problem of the capillary circulation by an appeal to clinical evidence, which soon led him into inaccuracies, as when he says that the fainting often seen in cases of blood-letting is due to the "cold blood rising upwards to the heart, for fainting often supervenes in robust subjects, and mostly at the moment of undoing the fillet, as the vulgar say from the 'turning of the blood.'"