134 EMBRYOLOGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH [pt. ii 



"qualities", etc., much as Digby himself had done. "Some of our 

 later philosophers have showed us that those forms w'^*^ they thought 

 and taught to bee but potentially in the matter, are there actually 

 subsisting though till they have acquired fitting organs, they manifest 

 not themselves. And that the effects which were done before their 

 manifestation (as the forming and fashioning of the parts wherein 

 they are to operate) can rise from nothing else than from the Soul 

 itselfe. This likewise I shall leave to the Readers enquiry, and shall 

 follow that other way of introducing Forms, and Generation of 

 creatures (as well animals as vegetables) which gives Fortune and 

 Chance the preheminency in that work." He then describes Sir 

 Kenelm's opinions, quoting from him in detail, and dissents from 

 them mainly on the ground that they do not sufficiently account 

 for embryogeny, as it were, from a technical point of view. That they 

 subvert the "antique principals of philosophy" does not worry 

 Highmore, but in his view their detailed mechanisms do not explain 

 the facts, a much more serious drawback. Highmore is himself by 

 way of being an Atomist, and it is because embryology was first 

 treated by him from an atomistic standpoint that he derives his 

 importance. "The blood, that all parts may be irrigated with its 

 benigne moisture, is forc'd by several channels to run through every 

 region and part of the body; by which meanes every part out of 

 that stream selects those atomes which they finde to be cognate to 

 themselves. Amongst which the Testicles abstract some spiritual 

 atomes belonging to every part, which had they not here been 

 anticipated, should have been attracted to those parts, to which 

 properly they did belong for nourishment. . . . These particles passing 

 through the body of the Testicles, and being in this Athanor cohobated 

 and reposited into a tenacious matter, at last passe through infinite 

 Meanders through certain vessels, in which it undergoes another 

 digestion and pelicanizing." Highmore objects, therefore, more to 

 Digby 's theory of pangenesis than to his description of embryogenesis. 

 He goes on to give a long description of the development of the chick 

 in the egg, mentioning in passing that the albumen corresponds to 

 the semen and the blood of vivipara and the yolk to their milk. 

 "Fabritius, who hath taken a great deal of pains in dissections. . . 

 supposes the chick to be formed from the chalazae, that part which 

 by our Women is called the treddle. But this likewise is false, for 

 then every egge should produce 2 chickens, there being one treddle 



