1S70.] BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 321 



countryman, Harvey, that he was the first to declare the opposition 

 of fact to venerable authority in this, as in other matters; but I 

 can discover no justification for this wide-spread notion. After 

 careful search through the ' Exercitationes de Generatione,' the 

 most that appears clear to me is, that Harvey believed all animals 

 and plants to spring from what he terms a^primordium vegetale,'" 

 a phrase which may now-a-days be rendered " a vegetative germ" • 

 and this, he says, is '' ovi/orme,^' or " egg-like" ; not, he is careful 

 to add, that it necessarily has the shape of an egg, but because it, 

 has the constitution and nature of one. That this ^^ primordlum 

 oviforme'^ must needs, in all cases, proceed from a living parent is 

 nowhere expressly maintained by Harvey, though such an opinion 

 may be thought to be implied in one or two passages ; while, on 

 the other hand, he does, more than once, use language which is 

 consistent only with a full belief in spontaneous or equivocal 

 generation. In fact, the main concern of Harvey's wonderful little 

 treatise is not with generation, in the physiological sense, at all, 

 but with developement ; and his great object is the establishment 

 of the doctrine of Epigenesis. 



The first distinct enunciation of the hypothesis that all living 

 matter has sprung from pre-existing living matter, came from a 

 contemporary, though a junior, of Harvey, a native of that 

 country, fertile in men great in all departments of human activity, 

 which was to intellectual Europe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth 

 centuries, what Germany is in the nineteenth. It was in Italy, 

 and from Italian teachers, that Harvey received the most 

 important part of his scientific education. And it was a student 

 trained in the same schools, Francesco Redi — a man of the widest 

 knowledge and most versatile abilities, distinguished alike as 

 scholar, poet, physician, and naturalist, — who, just 202 years ago, 

 published his ' Esperienze intorno alia Generazione degl' Insetti,' 

 and gave to the world the idea, the growth of which it is my 

 purpose to trace. Redi's book went through five editions in 

 twenty years ; and the extreme simplicity of his experiments, and 

 the clearness of his arguments, gained for his views, and for their 

 consequences, almost univcrs'al acceptance. 



Kedi did not trouble himself much with speculative 

 considerations, but attacked particular cases of what was supposed 

 to be '' spontaneous generation" experimentally. Here are dead 

 animals, or pieces of meat, says he ; I expose them to the air in hot 

 weather, and in a few days they swarm with maggots. You tell 

 YoL. Y. V Kg. 3. 



