igo THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY [pt. ii 



in all other respects. He concludes that the umbilical cord 

 serves for respiration and nutrition. 



XXV. After these three French workers, there is a great drop to 

 Johannes Zeller, whose Infanticidas non absolvit nee a tortura 

 liberal pulmonum infantis in aqua subsidentia (first published 



1 691) is a long-winded discussion of the floating lung test 

 in forensic medicine. His memory deserves a word of obloquy 

 for his vigorous insistence upon torture and death for in- 

 fanticide even during puerperal insanity. Perhaps it was 

 Zeller who called forth the noble answer of de la Mettrie 

 to this inhumanity in his Man a Machine. 



XXVI. Zeller's De Vila Humana ex June pendenle (first published 



1692) is no better, though at the time, perhaps because 

 of its striking title, it was famous. It deals with the ligation 

 of the umbilical cord at birth. 



This completes the list of the papers published by Haller in his 

 1750 collection. He retired from the Gottingen chair three years 

 later, and in 1757 the first volume of his Elemenla Physiologiae was 

 published, probably the greatest text-book of physiology ever written. 

 It appeared only by slow degrees, so that it was not until 1766 that 

 the embryological section was available. This volume contains 

 a discussion of a mass of literature, most of which had arisen 

 during the preceding twenty-five years, for, although many of the 

 names mentioned by Haller occur also in Schurig, yet many are 

 quite new. 



Haller himself published in 1 767 a volume of his collected papers 

 on embryology, most of which were concerned with the developing 

 heart of the chick, which he worked out very thoroughly, in collabora- 

 tion with Kuhlemann. (Kuhlemann had already done for the 

 sheep what Harvey had done for the doe.) He made a beginning 

 with the quantitative description of embryogeny, and one of his 

 tables showing the changing lengths of the bones is reproduced here- 

 with (Fig. 10). He was a convinced preformationist, a fact which was 

 largely due to his researches on the hen's egg, where he observed that 

 the yolk had a much more intimate connection with the embryo 

 than had previously been supposed. Since the whole yolk was part of 

 the embryo, as it were, the preformation theory seemed to him to 

 fit the facts better than epigenesis. 



