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In comparable manner, the latter's Arcana Microcosmi, published in 1652, declares its purpose to be "a refutation of Dr. Brown's Vulgar Errors, the Lord Bacon's Natural History, and Dr. Harvy's book De Generatione."
Had a translation of Aristotle's Historia animalium or De generatione animalium survived, had a Latin version of the Hippocratic work On generation or of the treatises of Theophrastus On plants reached the earlier Middle Ages, the whole mental history of Europe might have been different and the rediscovery of nature might have been antedated by centuries.
L. Dittmeyer, Guilelmi Moerbekensis translatio commentationis Aristotelicae de generatione animalium, Dillingen, 1915. L. Dittmeyer, De animalibus historia, Leipzig, 1907.
Harvey wrote, or at least published, only two small books, one of which is the well-known treatise on the circulation of the blood. The other, the "Exercitationes de Generatione," is less known, but not less remarkable.
This little book is the edition of 1651 of the 'Exercitationes de Generatione'; and if you were to add another little book, printed in the same small type, and about one-seventh of the thickness, you would have the sum total of the printed matter which Harvey contributed to our literature.
In 1651, about two months before publication of Highmore's History of Generation, a work appeared which marks another period in seventeenth-century English embryology. William Harvey, De Motu Cordis almost a quarter of a century behind him, now published De Generatione Animalium, the work he said was calculated "to throw still greater light upon natural philosophy."
De Generatione Animalium, Oxford translation, Bk. II, Chap. 6, Works V, 743 a. In Vol. IV of Gomperz' "Greek Thinkers," you will find an admirable discussion on Aristotle as an investigator of nature, and those of you who wish to study his natural history works more closely may do so easily in the new translation which is in process of publication by the Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Even men of science accepted these conceptions and are, indeed, only now beginning to emancipate themselves from such ancient superstitions. R. de Graef in the Preface to his famous treatise on the generative organs of women, De Mulierum Organis Generatione Inservientibus, dedicated to Cosmo III de Medici in 1672, considered it necessary to apologize for the subject of his work.
It is perhaps easy to underestimate the impact and general importance of Harvey's work in view of these qualifications, and so it should be remarked that both positive and negative features of De Generatione influenced profoundly subsequent embryological thought. It will be recalled that the title of The Philosophicall Touch-Stone identified Digby as the object of Alexander Ross's ire.
But, though Harvey made this signal and perennially important contribution to the physiology of the moderns, his general conception of vital processes was essentially identical with that of the ancients; and, in the "Exercitationes de generatione," and notably in the singular chapter "De calido innato," he shows himself a true son of Galen and of Aristotle.
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