The mystic or Cabalistic notions of Harvey's day have just been mentioned. Under them we may recognize many degenerate products and amalgamations of the real doctrines of Paracelsus. The doctrines of the Rosicrucians, as well as of Zoroaster and the Cabala, were revived and made to do strange work. There was, for instance, that Sir Kenelm Digby, who died in 1605, a King's chamberlain, who posed among the English as a so-called Rosicrucian. It was he who suggested the famous "sympathetic powder," which was to be applied to the weapon by which a wound had been inflicted, after which the weapon was anointed and dressed two or three times a day, while the wound itself was carefully bound up with dressings and left alone for a week. This was perhaps much the better course, but it will show what strange notions prevailed in those days.
What it meant to run counter to ecclesiastical policy and theological dogma appears not only in such tragedies as terminated the lives of Bruno and many other martyrs to science, but in such facts as these; for instance, when in 1624, just when Harvey was preparing to publish his work, some young chemists in Paris, seeing the benefit of the experimental method, broke away from Aristotle and the canons of theological reasoning, the faculty of theology appealed to the Parliament of Paris, which latter prohibited all such researches, under the severest penalties.
This was the time too when such exhibitions as the following were altogether too frequent;—One Quaresimo, of Lodi, came out with a ponderous work entitled "A Historical, Theological and Moral Explanation of the Holy Land," in which he devoted great space to the question of The Dead Sea and the salt pillar supposed to represent Lot's wife, dividing a long chapter upon the subject into three parts, dealing with the method and the locality of this transformation and the question of the existence at that time of her saline remains. Thus, with his peculiar powers of reasoning, he was able to decide the exact point where the saline change took place, and finally showed that the statue was still in existence.
Lord Bacon was also an older contemporary of Harvey, having been born in 1561 and dying in 1626, shortly after the appearance of Harvey's great work. His services to analytic science need no description here, but it is worth while to remember that Harvey, like many others, must have come under his influence and have profited by his teachings in logic and analysis.
At about the time when Harvey made known his discovery Bacon was publishing his views of the laws of transmission and reflection of sound. Great man as he was, with a keen foresight into the value of the recent inventions of the compass, gun-powder and printing, he nevertheless was himself so narrow, in some respects, that he placed but little value upon the discovery of Copernicus. He, however, paved the way for one in some respects still greater, namely Isaac Newton, who, however, had scarcely attained man's stature when Harvey died.
How much we owe to the two great Bacons of history one cannot indicate in this short résumé. Roger Bacon (1214-1292) seems to have been the first great thinker along truly scientific lines. He was more than a mere chemist while, as White says, more than three centuries before Francis Bacon advocated the experimental method Roger Bacon had practised it, and in many directions. He did more than anyone else in the middle ages to direct thought into fruitful paths, and only now are we finding out how nearly he reached some of the principal doctrines of modern philosophy and chemistry. Most important of all, his methods were even greater than his results, and this at a time when "theological subtilizing" was the only passport to reputation for scholarship.
It was Avicenna, the Arabian, who perhaps first announced substantially the modern theory of geology, accounting for changes in the earth's surface by suggesting a stone-making force, but the presence of fossils in the rocks had been always a thorn in the sides of the theologians. It was Leonardo da Vinci, that versatile genius in science and art, who, previous to Harvey's generation, suggested true notions as to the origin of fossils, while, in Harvey's time, Bernard Palissy, another artist, vehemently contended for their correctness. Still, even at Harvey's death, neither geology nor paleontology had come anywhere near scientific accuracy.
The Academia dei Lyncei, so-called from its seal, which bore the image of a fox, was founded in Rome in 1603. In France The Academy of Science was not founded until 1665, in Germany The Society of Naturalists and Physicians in 1652, and the British Royal Society in 1665.
In matters of general interest it may be worth while to say that in architecture the general style of The Renaissance was changed for the more substantial Barocco, while the more formal and limited style of church music had given away to musical drama, i. e., opera, albeit in very crude form. The first newspaper had appeared at Antwerp in 1605, the first German paper being published in Frankfort in 1615, and The London Weekly News making its first appearance in 1620. Tobacco, which had been brought over by Raleigh in 1560, had come into quite general use, while coffee, tea and chocolate had gained in public esteem. When coffee was first introduced in England it sold for about $28 a pound. The first coffee house appears to have been established in Constantinople, in the middle of the 16th century, while the first coffee house in London was not opened until a century later.
The barbers still retained their ascendency, and the bath keepers had scarcely lost their position next to the barbers. It was not until Harvey had reached a ripe age that the barbers were required in Germany to pass an examination, in which they had to prove not only their knowledge but the legitimacy of their birth, and the fact that they had studied for three years and had worked for three years more as apprentices.