ON GENERATION. 285 



the act of generation, the testes and vasa deferentia in the male, 

 the ovarium and uterus and blood-vessels supplying them in the 

 female are all contrived with such signal art and forethought, 

 and everything requisite to reproduction in a determinate direc- 

 tion situation, form, temperature, arranged so admirably, it 

 seems certain, as nature does nothing in vain, nor works in any 

 round-about way when a shorter path lies open to her, that an 

 egg can be produced in no other manner than that in which we 

 now see it engendered, viz., by the concurring act of the cock and 

 hen. Neither, in like manner, in the present constitution of 

 things, can a cock or hen ever be produced otherwise than from 

 an egg. Thus the cock and the hen exist for the sake of the 

 egg, and the egg, in the same way, is their antecedent cause ; 

 it were therefore reasonable to ask, with Plutarch, which of 

 these was the prior, the egg or the fowl ? Now the fowl is prior 

 by nature, but the egg is prior in time ; for that which is the 

 more excellent is naturally first ; but that from which a certain 

 thing is produced must be reputed first in respect of time. Or 

 we may say : this egg is older than that fowl (the fowl having 

 been produced from it) ; and, on the contrary, this fowl existed 

 before that egg (which she has laid). And this is the round 

 that makes the race of the common fowl eternal ; now pullet, 

 now egg, the series is continued in perpetuity ; from frail and 

 perishing individuals an immortal species is engendered. By 

 these, and means like to these, do we see many inferior or ter- 

 restrial things brought to emulate the perpetuity of superior or 

 celestial things. 



And whether we say, or do not say, that the vital principle 

 (anima) inheres in the egg, it still plainly appears, from the 

 circuit indicated, that there must be some principle influencing 

 this revolution from the fowl to the egg and from the egg back 

 to the fowl, which gives them perpetuity. Now this, according 

 to Aristotle's views, 1 is analogous to the element of the stars ; 

 and is that which makes parents engender, and gives fertility to 

 their ova; and the same principle, Proteus like, is present 

 under a different form, in the parents as in the eggs. For, as 

 the same intelligence or spirit which incessantly actuates the 

 mighty mass of the universe, and compels the same sun from 



1 De Gener. Anim. lib. ii, cap. 3. 



