ON GENERATION. 443 



one best adapted to effect the exclusion of the chick." It had been 

 well after such a preface to have assigned satisfactory causes 

 why hen's eggs are not spherical, like the eggs of fishes, worms 

 and frogs, but oblong and pointed ; to have shown what there 

 is in them which hinders the presumed perfection of figure. Now 

 to me the form of the egg has never appeared to have aught to 

 do with the engendennent of the chick, but to be a mere acci- 

 dent; and to this conclusion I come the rather when I see 

 such diversities in the shape of the eggs of different hens. They 

 vary, in short, in conformity with the variety that obtains 

 among the uteri of different fowls, in which, as in moulds, 

 they receive their form. 



Aristotle, 1 indeed, says that the longer-shaped eggs produce 

 females, the rounder males. I have not made any experiments 

 upon this point myself. But Pliny 2 asserts, in opposition to 

 Aristotle, that the rounder eggs produce females, the others 

 males. Now were there any certainty in such statements, 

 either in one way or the other, some hens would always pro- 

 duce males, others always females, inasmuch as the eggs of the 

 same hen are in many instances always of one figure, namely, 

 either much rounded or acutely pointed. Horace 3 thought 

 that the oblong eggs, as being the more perfect and better con- 

 cocted, and therefore the better flavoured, produced males. 



I willingly pass by the reasons alleged by Fabricius for the 

 form of eggs, as being all irrelevant. 



The size of an egg appears to bear a proportion to the size 

 of the foetus produced from it ; large hens, too, certainly lay 

 large eggs. The crocodile, however, lays eggs the size of those 

 of the goose ; nor does any animal attain to larger dimensions 

 from a smaller beginning. It would seem, too, that the size 

 of the egg and the quantity of matter it contained had some 

 connexion with its fecundity, inasmuch as the very small eggs 

 called centenines are all barren. 



The number of eggs serves the same end as abundance of con- 

 ceptions among viviparous animals they secure the perpetuity 

 of the species. Nature appears to have been particularly care- 

 ful in providing a numerous offspring to those animals which, 

 by reason of their pusillanimity or bodily weakness, hardly 



1 Hist. Auiin. lib. vi, cap. 2. * Lib. x, cap. 52. Plin. ibid. 



