Harvey's acquaintance with the literature of medicine enabled him to cite apposite examples, and must evidently have been of the greatest service to him in elucidating his problems. Hunter too often traversed paths which were already well trodden, for his defective education prevented him from knowing the works of his predecessors. The atmosphere of Courts and of the refined and learned society in which Harvey spent most of his life has given a polish to his writings and a gentleness to his character which were wholly wanting to John Hunter, upon whom the _res angustae domi_--absent in Harvey's case--had impressed a certain ruggedness of character, but in both there was a native strength and robustness of constitution which render them not dissimilar. As mere practitioners or curers of the body neither Harvey nor Hunter were highly esteemed by their contemporaries, though both made considerable sums of money by their art. The curiosity both of Harvey and of Hunter was boundless, but their minds were of the creative rather than of the imaginative type. Both collected facts and were averse to theories. Neither Hunter nor Harvey were religious men in the ordinary and narrow sense of the term. Harvey, living at an intensely religious period in the history of England, appears to have held the broad views befitting a student of nature. An eminently religious tone runs throughout his work, "a devout and reverential recognition of God," as Sir Russell Reynolds expressed it, "not only as the great primal ever-acting force, behind, outside and before all the works of Nature; but as the Being, 'the Almighty and Eternal God,' to whom he says in his last will and testament, 'I do most humbly render my soul to Him who gave it; and to my blessed Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus.'" Hunter living in a freer age had yet the remains of his Scottish upbringing adherent to the last. CHAPTER VIII HARVEY'S ANATOMICAL WORKS Harvey's _liber aureus_ is certainly his "Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus." [An Anatomical Treatise on the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals, by William Harvey, the Englishman, Physician to the King and Professor of Anatomy in the London College of Physicians.] The work was issued from the press of William Fitzer, of Frankfort, in the year 1621. Harvey chose Frankfort as the place of publication for his book because the annual book fair held in the town enabled a knowledge of his work to be more rapidly spread than if it had been issued in England.