278 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



myself and had misled the king, and that there must of necessity 

 be something of the * conception ' to be found in the uterus. 

 These men, however, when I got them to bring their own eyes 

 to the inquiry, gave up the point." Harvey tells us the king fully 

 appreciated the value of the investigation, and in order that this 

 important question might be the more satisfactorily settled in all 

 time to come, provided means for isolating the does and thus 

 proving that there was no error as to the fact of conception ; 

 but the physicians were still unconvinced, and " held it among 

 their impossibilities that any conception should ever be found 

 without the presence of excrement in one form or another." But 

 the man who had proved the error of their teachings regarding 

 the function of the heart and blood-vessels had little tolerance 

 for their belief in anything they were unable to demonstrate. 



If they had insisted that Harvey's resources were inadequate, 

 and that the conception for which he sought is a living being 

 too minute to be found by such rough means, but, to use the word 

 he employs in another place, ** like the youth who comes of age, 

 made independent even from its first appearance, as the acorn 

 taken from the oak, and the seeds of plants in general, are no 

 longer to be considered parts of the tree or herb that supported, , 

 them, but things made in their own right, and which alreadyf^ 

 enjoy life," we now know they would have been in the right. But 

 his proof of the non-existence in the uterus of the doe of the excre- 

 ment, of which they had taught that the conception consists, is 

 conclusive. 



Harvey did not stop here, however; for he made careful obser- 

 vations on the fowl, the rabbit, the dog, and on many other animals, 

 and proved that none of them are generated out of excrement or 

 decomposing matter ; that there is no basis in nature for Aristotle's 

 opinion or that of the medical men of Harvey's day, and that all 

 their teachings break down when brought to the test of actual 

 observation. 



It is no small thing to prove the error of the belief, which had 

 been current for nearly two thousand years, and is even now embod- 

 ied, through a quotation from St. Paul, in our burial service, that 

 all forms of reproduction are, at bottom, examples of spontaneous 

 generation out of dead putrescent matter. This Harvey accom- 



