SECT. 3] AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 199 



This is the most convenient place to mention theological embryo- 

 logy once again. Its place in the eighteenth century was small, and 

 in the nineteenth, with the recognition that whatever the soul is, it 

 is not a phenomenon, it altogether disappeared from serious general 

 discussion. F. E. Cangiamilla's Embryologia Sacra, however, ran through 

 several editions between 1700 and 1775. Cangiamilla {Panorm. 

 Eccl. Can. Theol. et in toto Sicil. regno contra haereticam pravitatem 

 Inquisitore provinciali) deals very frilly with the time of animation, 

 quoting a host of writers such as St Gelasius, St Anselm, Hugh of 

 St Victor and Pico della Mirandola. His mind retains a quite 

 mediaeval conformation, as the following curious passage illustrates : 

 '^ Quot non foetus abortivos ex ignorantia obstetricum et matrum excipit 

 lafrina, quorum anima, si Baptismate non fraudaretur, Deum in aeternam 

 videret, esset decentius tumulandum! " His instructions for the baptism 

 of monsters are also very odd. But theological embryology probably 

 reached its climax in the report of the Doctors of Divinity at the 

 Sorbonne on March 30, 1733, in which intra-uterine baptism by 

 means of a syringe was solemnly recommended. This is included 

 in Deventer's book, and has been referred to by Sterne and Spencer. 

 For other aspects of these tracts of thought see Nicholls and his 

 anonymous antagonist. But Cangiamilla and his colleagues — Gerike, 

 Kaltschmied, etc. — are only of decorative importance to our present 

 theme, and for fuller information regarding them, reference must be 

 made to the treatise of Witovski. It is interesting to note that as 

 late as 1913, 182 days was fixed as "perfection-time", whatever that 

 may be, by Moriani. 



3*12. Ovism and Animalculism 



We must now return to the beginning of the century in order to 

 pick up the thread of the main trend of thought. By 1720 the theory 

 of preformation was thoroughly established, not only on the erroneous 

 grounds put forward by Malpighi and Swammerdam, but on the 

 experiments of Andry, Hartsoeker, Dalenpatius and Gautier, who 

 all asserted that they had seen exceedingly minute forms of men, 

 with arms, heads, and legs complete, inside the spermatozoa under 

 the microscope. Gautier went so far as to say that he had seen a 

 microscopic horse in the semen of a horse (he gave a plate of it) 

 and a similar animalcule with very large ears in the semen of a 

 donkey; finally, he described minute cocks in the semen of a cock. 



