href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@47448@[email protected]#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[60] Harvey also cites Galen as saying that the parenchyma of the lung concocts spirits out of air as the flesh of the liver concocts the blood.[61] On turning to the Galenic passage cited by Harvey one finds that it is out of the food that the blood is thus concocted by the liver.

Realdus Columbus, to whom Harvey refers, was the Italian anatomist who in 1559, fifty-seven years before the Harveian circulation was verbally announced, gave to the world the important truth that such blood as the right ventricle imparts to the left reaches the latter by traversing the pores of the texture of the lungs,[62] instead of the pores of the septum of the ventricles, as Galen had taught. The existence of these pores of the septum Vesalius had pointedly wondered at in 1543 and had emphatically doubted in 1555.[63] Four years later his former assistant and temporary successor, Columbus, flatly denied the existence of the pores. It was natural, therefore, that in the same book in which Columbus brought forward the path through the lungs to replace that through the septum he should declare that the vital spirits are made out of air worked up with the blood in the lungs and then merely perfected in the left ventricle. This doctrine was an important advance beyond what Galen had taught, viz.: that the spirits are but slightly prepared in the lungs out of air and then sent to the left ventricle to undergo their main preparation and to be worked up therein with the blood which had filtered into it directly out of the right ventricle.