PALEY, AND THE ARGUMENT FROM CONTRIVANCE 



the male causes the purest part of the catamenia to set and form 

 a coagulum like curdled milk, and he believes that the embryo 

 arises from this coagulum by spontaneous generation. 



One modification or another of this opinion continued to pre- 

 vail until Harvey's day, and it is plain that experiments on the 

 generation of insects was mere skirmishing on the outposts of the 

 problem until the belief in the generation of the higher animals 

 out of excrement had been corrected ; and Harvey wisely concen- 

 trated his attention on this citadel of the belief in the origin of 

 living things from dead matter. If a mass of excrement exists in 

 the uterus immediately after a fertile union, this ought to be dis- 

 coverable; and Harvey, a true scientific investigator, set to work 

 to hunt for it without a microscope, more than two hundred years 

 before the discovery of the human ovum by Von Baer. 



His facilities for making the search, and its results, are best 

 described in his own words. He was the attending physician of 

 the king of England, and he tells us "it was customary with 

 his Serene Majesty, King Charles, after he had come to man's 

 estate, to take the diversion of hunting almost every week, both for 

 the sake of finding relaxation from graver cares and for his health ; 

 the chase was principally the buck and the doe, and no prince 

 in the world had greater herds of deer. This gave me an oppor- 

 tunity of dissecting these animals almost every day during the 

 whole season when they were rutting, taking the male, and falling 

 with young. I had occasion so often as I desired it to examine 

 and study all their parts, particularly those devoted to the offices 

 of generation." 



His researches had a very definite result. Repeated dissections 

 performed in the course of the month of October, both before 

 the rutting season was over and after it had passed, never showed 

 a trace of coagulated blood or excrement of any sort. Neither 

 the bloody coagulum of Aristotle nor the geniture of the medical 

 men has any existence. The " conception " which should be discov- 

 erable, if their teachings are correct, cannot be found when search 

 is made for it, and actual observation shows that the opinion which 

 had been current for nearly two thousand years is erroneous and 

 fanciful. 



The keepers and huntsmen said that " I was both deceiving 



