GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 811 



To the beautiful demonstration of the steps in the successive 

 building up and moulding of the intestinal canal, out of the 

 'mucous layer' of the blastoderm, Cuvier objects: — ' Mais 

 quand il serait vrai que l'intestin se forme comme Wolff croyait 

 l'avoir observe, il n'en resulterait aucune preuve en faveur de 

 l'epigenese ; car le nombril, par lequel Fembryon tient a son pla- 

 centa, est d'abord tout aussi large que l'animal lui-meme ; c'est 

 en enveloppant la portion du jaune qui doit rester dans l'inte- 

 rieur, que la peau finit par retrecir de plus en plus cette ou- 

 verture, qui primitivement n'en etait pas une, et par la reduire a 

 l'ombilic tel qu'on le voit dans le poulet ou dans l'enfant naissant.' 1 



GeofFroy contended that the dogma of ( pre-existence of germs ' 

 owed its origin to a metaphysical explanation of ill-observed phe- 

 nomena. To admit that a germ included within itself all the 

 forms, in miniature, which were afterwards to be manifested, and 

 to develope such theory by a matter so indefinable, was to mul- 

 tiply, at will, the most gratuitous suppositions. 2 His opponent's 

 passages, above quoted, in defence of a doctrine now deemed by 

 embryologists to be dead and buried, have hardly other than his- 

 torical interest ; 3 and I should not have recalled them, or their 



1 cccvii''. torn. iv. p. 277. 2 Anat. Philos. vol. ii. p. 280. 



8 A polemical bishop, viewing with the mixed feelings of his kind the dawn of new 

 light, which, in 1669, began to flood men's minds from the 'Essay on the Human 

 Understanding,' commenced his attack by insinuating ' unsoundness ' in the author ; 

 then called upon Locke ' to clear himself by declaring to the world, that he owned 

 the doctrine of the Trinity, as it hath been received in the Christian Church.' (Bp. 

 of Worcester's ' Answer to Locke's Second Letter,' p. 4.) Finally, he charged him 

 with diffusing principles inconsistent with, and sapping the grounds of, belief in the 

 following articles of the Christian faith: 'the Resurrection of the Body,' the 'Trinity,' 

 and the ' Incarnation of Our Saviour.' It is in reference to the first article that the 

 antagonism of ' evolution ' and ' epigenesis ' curiously comes in. Stillingfleet, con- 

 tending for the dogma of the ' same body,' against the objection of the transitory state 

 of its particles during life, affirmed that ' every seed had that body in little which is 

 afterwards so much enlarged,' and in proof that ' it hath its proper organical parts, 

 which makes it the same body with that which it grows up to, (lb. p. 40), refers to 

 ' certain most accurate observations whereby these seminal parts are discerned in 

 them, which afterwards grow up to that body which we call corn.' 



To which Locke replied: " If that could be so, and that the plant in its full growth 

 at harvest, increased by a thousand or a million of times as much new matter added 

 to it as it had, when it lay, in little, concealed in the grain that was sown, was the 

 very same body ; yet to say that every minute grain of the hundred grains contained 

 in that little organised seminal plant is every one of them the very same with that grain 

 which contains that whole little seminal plant, and all those invisible grains in it, is 

 to say that one grain is the same with an hundred, and one hundred distinct grains 

 the same with one ; which I shall be able to assent to, when I can conceive that all 

 the wheat in the world is but one grain." ('Second Reply to the Bp. of Worcester,' 

 in cccxxxvi". vol. i. p. 658.) 



The chief point of interest, here, is to note how the latest movement in Science is 

 pressed into questions of theological dogma. The newly established ' Philosophical 



