Generation of Entozoa. 107 
structure, with its organic and animal life, its digestive, mo- 
tive, and sensitive organs and functions, feels quite comfort- 
able, and wishes to perpetuate its happiness in the continua- 
tion of its race or family to future individuals like itself, that 
it possesses the phrenological organ of philoprogenitiveness, 
—what will it do? 
It will do this, what the Creator has done with the creatures 
formed by his own hand; it will provide itself with ovaries 
for containing eggs, the germs of future beings like itself; but 
how it is to form these, and how it is to impart to them the 
capability of being hatched into the identical resemblance of 
their parent, I pretend not to explain. 
But we know that even when eggs are formed there is a 
very essential requisite necessary for bringing them into active 
life. They must have a certain vivifymg power, without 
which they will remain as dead matter, and the fond hopes of 
the maternal parent will be frustrated unless this vital influ- 
ence can somehow or other be procured. The task, then, 
next to be accomplished, is to provide this male influence ; 
and we find that many species are androgynous, that is, the 
clot having produced its ovaries and ova, next fabricates organs 
for secreting the vivifying fluid, by whose presence the ova 
shall obtain the power of being developed into worms of the 
same formation and structure as their wonder-working parent. 
Yet surprising as all this may appear, the climax is not yet 
arrived at. ‘The Ascarides and some other genera are not an- 
drogynous or hermaphrodite, but distinctly male and female. 
Now on the principle of equivocal generation, it must be evi- 
dent that the effused lymph or clot has the power of meta- 
morphosing itself not only into a_worm, but into a worm of 
either sex, as it may choose to determine; and it is equally 
obvious, that two clots must consult together in order to deter- 
mine into what species they shall by mutual agreement be- 
come transformed. This must be absolutely necessary ; there 
must be a predetermined arrangement between the two ; for 
without this millions of males might be formed without one 
corresponding female, and millions of females be condemned 
to live and die in single blessedness. 
These and many other wonders, or rather impossibilities, we 
must have recourse to, in order to support the theory of spon- 
taneous generation ; a theory which, in my mind, is as incon- 
sistent with all that we observe of the operations of nature, as 
those which in the days of ignorance taught that putrid flesh 
of itself generated bees, that vapour influenced by an east 
wind changed into Aphides, and that the Lepas anatifera 
grew upon trees, and dropping into the sea became at length 
the barnacle goose. 
