the rev. William Tennent, to visit the frontiers of that state, in order to reconcile, if possible, a number of the inhabitants who were disaffected towards a revolutionary form of government-a business, which, though attended with great bodily fatigue and personal danger, he executed with great propriety and fidelity.

In the month of February, 1780, owing to his warm attachment to the American cause, it was thought adviseable, that he should leave Charleston, as the British troops were preparing to lay siege to it. Hearing of its surrender, which happened on the 12th May following, he journeyed towards his native soil, and in the month of December of the same. year, in consequence of the warmest solicitations, he undertook the pastoral charge of the church of Hopewell, New-Jersey, and there he continued till 31st December, 1795, when he died, aged 72 years 5 months and 26 days.

Mr. Hart was the author of several sermons and other compositions on religious subjects, which have appeared in print, and do honour to his pen and his heart. A variety of his papers on different subjects, which he highly valued, and many of his best books, were, likewise, destroyed by the British army, when they overrun the southern states. He had also a considerable turn for poetry, though such was his modesty, that but few of his intimate friends knew he possessed this talent.

Mr. Hart was blessed with such strong natural abilities, as to lay a foundation for those grateful services, which from his youth to a good old age he rendered to both church and state. His imagination was lively and his judgment firm: hence though he never enjoyed the advantages resulting from a regular progress through any public school or university; yet such were the improvements of his mind by self application, close reading, and habitual reflection, that few men more richly deserved those VOL. III. No. 17. D

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honors, which by our first seminaries of learning, have been in many instances too incautiously bestowed. The college of Rhode-Island, however, was not wholly inatentive to his worth, for in the year 1769, that institution forwarded him a diploma constituting him Master of Arts.

On the whole, Mr. Hart's character, both in the political and religious world, is too well known to stand in need of description. The endowments of his mind his early and unaffected piety: his abilities as a theologician and minister of the sanctuary: the regularity of his whole life: his domestic virtues and universal philanthropy point him out as having scarcely left an equal in the religious society to which he belonged.

He bore a long and tedious confinement with exemplary patience, becoming resignation, and to the last was strong in faith, giving glory to the God of

his salvation.

HARVEY (WILLIAM) an eminent physician, rendered illustrious, by being the first person who discovered the circulation of the blood, was born at Folkstone, in Kent, April 2d. 1578. At ten years of age he was put to the grammar school of Canterbury, and thence removed at 14 to Caius college, Cambridge, in order to be bred up to physic. Having spent five years there, in pursuing the study of that art, he went at the age of 19 to Padua, in Italy, for his farther. improvement, and having studied five years more under the best masters, particularly the famous Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, he was created Doctor of Physic in that university, 1602.

Soon after this period he returned to England and taking his degree of Doctor of Physic at Cambridge, repaired to London, where he began to practise in his profession, and afterwards married. It seems the Doctor had no children by his lady, and it was

probably for want of these to employ her time and attention, that she often amused herself with a parrot remarkable for talking, the extraordinary fate of which furnished her husband with the first experiment in support of his doctrine, that a female bird has the power of conceiving perfect eggs without the help of the male. The Doctor's account of this event may be found in his Treatise "On the Generation of Animals".

In 1604, he was admitted a candidate of the college of Physicians, and three years after elected fellow. In 1715, he was appointed lecturer of anatomy and surgery in that college, and began his first course of lectures in anatomy in April following, when he opened his famous discovery of the circulation of the blood, which he continued to explain in his subsequent lectures, and a few years after he finished his treatise on that subject. He was, about this time, appointed physician to king James I. and was continued in the same capacity by Charles I.

On the 3d of December, 1627, he was appointed one of the electors of the college of physicians, and his work" on the circulation of the blood," written in elegant Latin, was published in the year ensuing.

It has been the fate of some great discoveries to be disbelieved, while their authors instead of being rewarded, were treated as madmen and visionaries. The celebrated Galileo, who first observed the phases of Venus, the four satellites of Jupiter, &c. and who supported the opinion of Copernicus, respecting the motion of the earth, was persecuted by the inquisition, and his system declared absurd and false in sound philosophy, and erroneous in the faith, as being expressly contrary to scripture. Galileo, therefore, at the age of seventy, was obliged to ask pardon for having maintained what he really believed; and with his knees on the ground and his hands on the gospel, to abjure it as an error and heresy. Something of the same kind seems to have been the case

with the important discovery made by Doctor Harvey of the circulation of the blood; for though the Doctor was not treated with so much harshness, vet it raised up many adversaries against him, who attacked him on different sides and by very different arguments; but it appears, that they were both actuated by the same principle, envy. Of these, one party denied the truth of his discovery altogether, and considered it as an absurdity; while the other, allowing it to be true, endeavoured to deprive him of the bonor of it, and to bestow it on his predecessors in anatomy. The first he answered himself, as far as they deserved it; but of the latter he was more regardless, as he was either not apprehensive of any injury to his fame from that quarter, or was more solicitous to shew the importance of the discovery than anxious about his right to it. This, indeed, seems to be pretty evident, from his conduct with respect to Fracassati and Walaus, who ascribed the discovery to the celebrated Father Paul Sarpi, the Venetian. Joannes Leonicenus having asserted, that Father Paul, author of the history of the council of Trent, discovered the circulation of the blood, as well as the valves of the heart, says that he durst not make his discovery public, for fear of exposing himself to trouble, since he was already suspected, and nothing else was wanting but such a paradox to make him be accounted a heretic, in a country where the inquisition prevails. For this reason, he entrusted the secret to Aquapendente alone, who being cautious of rendering himself obnoxious to the rage of his enemies, who would have treated such a notion as a capital offence against the ancients, never disclosed it, but to men, of whom he entertained no suspicion, and waited till Father Paul's death, before he would suffer his treatise on the valves to be presented to the republic of Venice. That this treatise was deposited privately in the library of St. Mark, for fear of alarming the minds of the people, but that Aquapendente had before

discovered the secret to a curious young Englishman of the name of Harvey who studied under him at Padua, and that, at the same time, Father Paul communicated it in confidence to some Englishmen, who, on their return home, laid it before the public, and having confirmed it by a variety of experiments, claimed the whole honor of it to themselves. From the same story, the discovery of the circulation of the blood was ascribed also to Father Paul, by Fracassati, in his preliminary epistle to Malphigi and by Walæus, in his first epistle to Bartholine.

These attempts to deprive Dr. Harvey of an honor so justly due to him, being observed by his intimate friend Dr. George Ent, in order to confute these pretences, he remarks, that Dr. Harvey had long before related to him the occasion of this story, which was as follows. The Venetian ambassador, on his return home, having been presented by the Doctor, with his book concerning the circulation of the blood, lent it to Father Paul, who transcribed a great many passages from it, that he might the better remember them, and these transcripts after his death falling into the hands of his executors, gave occasion to several persons to imagine, that he was really the author of them. Besides this, Dr. Harvey received a letter from Fra. Fulgentio, Father Paul's most intimate friend, which sets the whole affair in the clearest light possible, and which was prefixed by Sir George Ent, to his "Apologia pro Circulatione Sanguinis." From the whole, therefore, it appears, that Dr. Harvey's book must have been finished some time. before the year 1623, since Father Paul died on the 14th of January in that year, and perhaps it will not be erring far from the truth, if it be fixed at the 1618, or 1619.

year

Upon the breaking out of the civil war, Dr. Harvey attended his majesty at the battle of Edge-Hill, and thence to Oxford, where he was incorporated Dr. of Physic, in December, 1642. He was also