Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III WILLIAM HARVEY AND EXPERIMENTAL OBSERVATION After the splendid observations of Vesalius, revealing in a new light the construction of the human body. Harvey took the next general step by introducing experiment to determine the use or purpose of the structures that Vesalius had so clearly exposed. Thus the work of Harvey was complemental to that of Vesalius, and we may safely say that, taken together, the work of these two men laid the foundations of the modern method of investigating nature. The results they obtained, and the influence of their method, are of especial interest to us in the present connection, inasmuch as they stand at the beginning of biological science after the Renaissance. Although the observations of both were applied mainly to the human body, they served to open the entire field of structural studies and of experimental observations on living organisms. Many of the experiments of Harvey, notably those relating to the movements of the heart, were, of course, conducted upon the lower animals, as the frog, the dog, etc. His experiments on the living human body consisted mainly in applying ligatures to the arms and the legs. Nevertheless, the results of all his experiments related to the phenomena of the circulation in the human body, and were primarily for the use of medical men. In what sense the observations of the two men were complemental will be better understood when we remember that there are two aspects in which living organisms should always be considered in biological studies; first, the struc- ture, and, then, the use that the structures subserve. One view is essential to the other, and no investigation of animals and plants is complete in which the two ideas are not involved. Just as a knowledge of the construction of ...