In this passage the discoverer's thought rises high, but in the next it stoops again. The next passage is headed "Spirits not from air"; and Harvey says in effect, as I understand his difficult words:—
If spirits are made by concoction out of air, the air is made either thinner or thicker in the process. If made thick, how does it get from the windpipes into the venous artery? If the spirits be thinner than air, how are they held[66] by the tunic of the lung, since this lets pass the pus and serum of empyema?[65]
In the treatise of 1628 Harvey says that Laurentius
"asserts and proves that, in empyema, serosities and pus absorbed from the cavity of the chest into the venous artery may be expelled and got rid of with the urine and fæces through the left ventricle of the heart and the arteries."[67]
Harvey's argument in his note-book continues thus:—
"How, since mixture consists in the union of altered matters, can air be thoroughly mixed and made one with blood? What is that which mixes and alters? If it be heat, the air is made thinner thereby. If it be urged that the air is thickened by cold during preparation (which is impossible in the lungs), then Aristotle's[68] argument holds good: if spirits be from the air, how about fishes, which are agile and abound in spirits?"[69]
At this point we may call to mind passages in the introduction to Harvey's treatise of 1628, published more than eleven years after he had written the notes which we are now studying. In one of these passages he speaks of what is now called the pulmonary vein, saying:—
"If it be contended that fumes and air pass to and fro by this road, as through the bronchia of the lungs, why can we find neither air nor fumes on dissection, when the venous artery has been cut out or cut into? And how comes it that we always see the aforesaid venous artery to be full of thick blood and never of air, while we perceive that there is air remaining in the lungs?"[70]
Immediately after the foregoing passage Harvey says that should an experimenter