66 EMBRYOLOGY IN ANTIQUITY [pt. ii 



she but a stranger, a friend, who, if fate spares his plant, preserves it 

 till it puts forth." 



There is evidence that this doctrine was of Egyptian origin, for 

 Diodorus Siculus says, "The Egyptians hold the father alone to be 

 the author of generation, and the mother only to provide a nidus 

 and nourishment for the foetus". Whether this was so or not, the 

 influence of such a doctrine must have been tremendous. We know 

 that the conception of the female sex as playing the part of farm-land, 

 i.e. of woman as a field in which grain was sown, was widespread 

 in antiquity; Hartland and S. A. Cook have collected examples of 

 it from Vedic, Egyptian and Talmudic sources. A late echo of it is 

 to be found in Lucretius, where he refers to "Venus sowing the field 

 of woman" — 



atque in eost Venus ut muliebria conserat arva. 



Nor would resemblances between mothers and children suffice to 

 kill this belief, for plants may diflfer slightly according to the soil 

 in which they are planted. Such an idea would be the natural 

 foundation for the practice — also widespread in antiquity — of putting 

 captured males to death, and retaining the females as concubines. 

 On such a theory no fear would be entertained of corrupting the 

 race with alien blood in this way. The whole matter affords an 

 excellent illustration of the way in which an apparently academic 

 theory may have the most far-reaching effects on social and political 

 events, and Aristotle, far from being remote from practical affairs 

 as he examined his viviparous fishes and made marginal notes on 

 his copy of Empedocles, is seen to be labouring at their very root. 



The embryo, then, took its origin from the menstrual blood, on 

 which, and in which, the seminal essence operated to produce it. 

 But the perplexing question of the order of formation of the parts 

 remained unsettled, though it had already been opened by earlier 

 thinkers. What they had not done was to put the question, as it 

 were, into the form of a motion ; they had not grasped the existence 

 of two main alternatives, one of which would have to be chosen 

 before any further progress could be made. This is just what Aristotle 

 did. "There is considerable difficulty", says he, "in understanding 

 how the plant is formed out of the seed or any animal out of the 

 semen. Everything that comes into being or is made must (i) be 

 made out of something, (2) be made by the agency of something, 



