SECT. 3] AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES 195 



that there is a great difference between the foetus and the perfect 

 animal, and if I said that in the animal at the moment of conception 

 one does not find the same parts as in the perfect animal, I have 

 realised abundantly since then that all I said against preformation 

 really went to support it". The reasons for this change of opinion 

 become no clearer as Haller's writings are more assiduously read, 

 and, as Dareste says, why he should have made it, will always 

 remain a mystery. 



The emboitement aspect of preformation presented no difficulties to 

 Haller. "It follows", he said, speaking of the generation of Volvox, 

 "that the ovary of an ancestress will contain not only her daughter, 

 but also her granddaughter, her great-granddaughter and her great- 

 great-granddaughter, and if it is once proved that an ovary can 

 contain many generations, there is no absurdity in saying that it 

 contains them all," 



The following passage is interesting. "We must proceed to say 

 what is the efficient cause of the beautiful machine which we call 

 an animal. First of all let us not attribute it to chance, as Ofrai 

 [is this Julien Offi-ay de la Mettrie? Haller had a habit of using 

 Christian names, e,g, Turberville for J. T. Needham] would have 

 us do, for although he pretends that all animals come from earth, 

 he is not attached to the ancient opinion, and nobody now believes 

 what Aelian says, namely that frogs are born from mud. . . , Vallisneri 

 has found the fathers and mothers of the little worms in galls, a quest 

 of which Redi despaired, and Redi in his turn has made with exacti- 

 tude and precision those experiments which Bonannus, Triumphet, 

 and Honoratus Faber had only sketched out imperfectly. Moreover, 

 no seed, no clover. . . . This was the received opinion but in our century 

 a proscribed notion has been revivified and some great men have 

 pretended that there are little animals which are engendered by an 

 equivocal generation, without father and mother, and that all the 

 viscera and all the parts of these animals do not exist together, but 

 that the nobler parts are formed first by epigenesis and that then 

 the others are formed little by little afterwards." This is an admirable 

 illustration of how spontaneous generation and epigenesis were bound 

 up together, "M. Needham", Haller goes on to say, "does not admit 

 an equivocal generation but he does admit epigenesis, and a corporeal 

 non-intelligent force, which constructs a body from a tiny little germ 

 furnishing the necessary matter for it. He says that there are only 



13-2 



