Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood

There is a passage in Longinus (ch. xxii.), familiar perhaps to some of the readers of the "NOTES AND QUERIES," which indicates that the fact of the circulation of the blood was well established in the days of Plato. The father of critics, to exemplify, and illustrate the use and value of *trope* in writing, has garbled from the Timaeus, a number of sentences descriptive of the anatomy of the human body, where the circulation of the blood is pointed at in terms singularly graphic. The exact extent of professional knowledge arrived at in the time of the great philosopher is by no means clearly…