Consumed by the mystery of how blood was moved throughout the body, Harvey meticulously dissected dozens of animals and examined countless corpses to feed his curious mind. Harvey was a pioneer in this field, and his discoveries disproved many popular beliefs of the time about human anatomy. He made four very important discoveries. First, blood circulates throughout the body through a recycling process. Harvey calculated that the heart was pumping “8,460 ounces [of blood] per hour.” This “[forced him] to conclude that the heart does not continuously produce new blood but rather circulates or “recycles” it” (68). Second, blood contains air. For many years it was believed that “arteries contained blood and only blood, neither air nor alcohol,” but when Harvey cut off the access of air to the pulmonary vein in a dog but allowed an incision to be made so that the If air entered its lungs, the beast could not survive. Evidence has shown that air is somehow transmitted through the pulmonary vein to the heart. The third discovery was that the pulse is not produced by the arteries drawing blood, but rather by the blood being pushed from the heart into the arteries, dilating them. Harvey's last great discovery was that there are no vessels in the cardiac septum. All the blood in the right ventricle goes to the lungs and then through the pulmonary veins to the left ventricle.,