82 EMBRYOLOGY IN ANTIQUITY [pt. ii 



right into the Middle Ages, and was particularly vehement in the 

 case of the treatise on gynaecology, Trepl ywaiKeLwv Tradotv. This was 

 translated into Latin under the name of Moschion, then back into 

 Greek and finally back into Latin again. It is largely obstetrical, 

 but it shows an advanced knowledge of embryology, and especially 

 an accurate idea of the anatomy of the uterus. (See Plate II.) 



The other writers of this period are unimportant embryologically. 

 Among the Greeks, Aelian wrote a De natura animalium, in which 

 he spoke of eggs, but without adding anything to our knowledge of 

 them; Nicander in his Theriaca refers to mammalian embryos, and 

 alleges that they breathe and eat through the umbilical cord; and 

 Oppian has a few unsystematic remarks about the embryos of various 

 animals. Junius Columella's work on husbandry contains two chapters 

 on eggs, but he was not much interested in the theoretical aspect of 

 development. In Aulus Gellius we have the cheese analogy appearing 

 in conjunction with obscurantist views about the powers of the number 

 seven. It is not generally known that a clear statement of the pre- 

 formationist or " Entfaltung " theory of embryogeny occurs in Seneca's 

 Quaestiones naturales, where there is the following passage: "In the 

 seed are enclosed all the parts of the body of the man that shall be 

 formed. The infant that is borne in his mother's wombe hath the 

 rootes of the beard and hair that he shall weare one day. In this 

 little masse likewise are all the lineaments of the bodie and all that 

 which Posterity shall discover in him". Perhaps this notion was 

 derived by Seneca from the Homoeomereity of Anaxagoras, for a 

 discussion of which in relation to embryology, see Cornford. "Hair 

 cannot come out of not-hair, nor flesh out of not-flesh", said 

 Anaxagoras. 



The Natural History of Pliny, that "voluminous, industrious, un- 

 philosophical, gullible, unsystematic old gossip", as Singer justly 

 calls him, contains little of embryological importance, although he 

 devotes many sections to eggs, and what there is comes straight from 

 the fountain-head, Aristotle. As, for example, "All egs have within 

 them in the mids of the yolk, a certain drop, as it were of bloud, 

 which some thinke to be the heart of the chicken, imagining that, 

 to be the first that in everie bodie is formed and made ; and certainlie 

 a man shall see it within the verie cggc to pant and leape. As for 

 the chick, it taketh the corporall substance, and the bodie of it is 

 made of the white waterish liquor in the egge, the yellow yolke 



