46 EMBRYOLOGY IN ANTIQ^UITY [pt. ii 



very desirous (like a yong fine lady as she was) to have a jolly boy, 

 practised this girlish experiment to foreknow what she should have 

 in the end; she tooke an egge, and ever carried it about her in her 

 warme bosome; and if at any time she had occasion to lay it away, 

 she would convey it closely out of her own warme lap into her 

 nurses for feare it should chill. And verily this presage proved true, 

 the egge became a cocke chicken, and she was delivered of a sonne. 

 And hereof it may well be came the device of late, to lay egges in 

 some warme place and to make a soft fire underneath of small straw 

 or light chaffe to give a kinde of moderate heate ; but evermore the 

 egges must be turned with a mans or womans hand, both night and 

 day, and so at the set time they looked for chickens and had them" 

 (Philemon Holland's translation). 



Pliny also says, "Over and besides there be some egs that will 

 come to be birds without sitting of the henne, even by the worke 

 of Nature onely, as a man may see the experience in the dunghills 

 of Egypt. There goeth a prettyjeast of a notable drunkard of Syracusa, 

 whose manner was when hee went into the Taverne to drinke to lay 

 certaine egges in the earth, and cover them with moulde, and he 

 would not rise nor give over bibbing untill they were hatched. To 

 conclude, a man or a woman may hatch egges with the very heate 

 onely of their body". This story occurs also in Aristotle. 



The Emperor Hadrian — curiositatum omnium explorator as Tertullian 

 calls him — writing in a.d. 130 to his brother-in-law, L. Julius 

 Servianus, from Egypt, says, "I wish them no worse than that 

 they should feed on their own chickens, and how foully they hatch 

 them, I am ashamed to tell you". In the Description de VEgypte, 

 written by the members of the scientific staff of Napoleon's Egyptian 

 expedition, and published at Paris in 1809, Roziere and Rouyer 

 wrote on the artificial incubation of the Egyptians. They conjecture 

 very probably that the Emperor was shocked owing to a misunder- 

 standing shared by Aristotle, PUny, de Pauw and Reaumur, namely, 

 that the "gelleh" or dung was used to heat the eggs by its fermenta- 

 tion, and not, as is and was actually the case, by being slowly burnt 

 in the incubation ovens. Bay gave an account of the ovens in modern 

 times, but the best one is that of Lane. "The Egyptians", said Lane 

 in 1836, "have long been famous for hatching fowls' eggs by artificial 

 heat. This practice, though obscurely described by ancient authors, 

 appears to have become common in ancient Egypt from an early 



