ON GENERATION. 281 



range the natural matter in things that are internal, and supply 

 fresh matter according to the several dimensions in the place 

 of that which has been lost ? How can anything be affected 

 or moved by that which does not touch it? Wherefore, with- 

 out question, the same things happen in the engenderment of 

 eggs which take place in the beginning of all living things 

 whatsoever, viz.: they are primarily constituted by external and 

 preexisting beings ; but so soon as they are endowed with life, 

 they suffice for their own nourishment and increase, and this 

 in virtue of peculiar inherent forces, innate, implanted from the 

 beginning. 



What has already been said of the vital principle appears 

 clearly to proclaim that the egg is neither the work of the 

 uterus, nor governed by that organ ; for it is manifest that the 

 vegetative principle inheres even in the hypenemic egg, inas- 

 much as we have seen that this egg is nourished and is pre- 

 served, increases and vegetates, all of which acts are indications of 

 the presence of the principle mentioned. But neither from the 

 mother nor the uterus can this principle proceed, seeing that 

 the egg has no connexion or union with them, but is free and 

 unconnected, like a son emancipated from pupillage, rolling 

 round within the cavity of the uterus and perfecting itself, even 

 as the seeds of plants are perfected in the bosom of the earth, 

 viz., by an internal vegetative principle, which can be nothing 

 else than the vegetative soul. 



And it will appear all the more certain that it is possessed 

 of a soul or vital principle, if we consider by what compact, 

 what moving power, the round and ample yelk, detached from 

 the cluster of the ovary, descends through the infundibulum 

 a most slender tube composed of a singularly delicate membrane, 

 and possessed of no motory fibres and opening a path for itself, 

 approaches the uterus through such a number of straits, arrived 

 in which it continues to be nourished, and grows and is sur- 

 rounded with albumen. Now as there is no motory organ dis- 

 coverable either in the ovary which expels the vitellus, or in the 

 infundibulum which transmits, or in the uterus which attracts 

 it, and as the egg is not connected with the uterus, nor yet 

 with the ovary by means of vessels, nor hangs from either by 

 an umbilical cord, as Fabricius truly states, and demonstrates 



