VIII BIOGENESIS AND ABIOGENESIS 233 



wonderful little treatise is not with generation, in 

 the physiological sense, at all, but with develop- 

 ment; 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 import- 

 ant 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 two 

 hundred and two years ago, published his " Esper- 

 ienze 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 



parentibus sui dissimilibus proveniant." Again, in De Uteri 

 Membranis : "In cunctorum viventium generatione (sicut 

 diximus) hoc solenne est, ut ortum ducunt a primordio aliquo, 

 quod turn materiam turn efficiendi potestatem in se habet : 

 sitque adeo id, ex quo et a quo quicquid nascitur, ortum suum 

 ducat. Tale primordium in animalibus (sive ab aliis generantibus 

 proveniant, sive sponte, aut ex putredine nascentur) est humor 

 in tunica aliqua aut putami ne conclusus." Compare also 

 what Redi has to say respecting Harvey's opinions, Esperienze, 

 p. 11. 



