Ixxiv REPORT 1870. 



cept Goethe, intends to speak as a philosopher, rather than as a poet, when 

 he writes that " with good reason the earth has gotten the name of mother, 

 since all things arc produced out of the earth. And many living creatures, 

 even now, spring out of the earth, taking form by the rains and the heat of 

 the sun"*. The axiom of ancient science, " that the corruption of one thing 

 is the birth of another," had its popular embodiment in the notion that a seed 

 dies before the young plant springs from it ; a belief so widespread and so 

 fixed, that Saint Paul appeals to it in one of the most splendid outbursts of 

 his fervid eloquence : — 



" Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die"t. 



The proposition that life may, and does, proceed from that which has no 

 life, then, was held alike by the philosophers, the poets, and the people, of the 

 most enlightened nations, eighteen hundred years ago ; and it remained the 

 accepted doctrine of learned and unlearned Europe, through the Middle Ages, 

 down even to the seventeenth century. 



It is commonly counted among the many merits of our great country- 

 man, Harvey, that he was the first to declare the opposition of fact to vene- 

 rable authority in this, as in other matters ; biit I can discover no justification 

 for tWs widespread notion. After careful search through the ' Exercita- 

 tiones de Generatione,' the most that appears clear to me is, that Harvey 

 believed all animals and plants to spring from what he terms a " primor- 

 clium vegetale," a phrase which may nowadays be rendered " a vegetative 

 germ ; " and this, he says, is " oviforme," or " egg-like ; " not, he is 

 careful to add, that it necessarily has the shape of an egg, but because 

 it has the constitution and nature of one. That this " prhnordium oviforme" 

 must needs, in all cases, proceed from a living parent is nowhere expressly 

 maintained by Harvey, though such an opinion may be thought to be implied 

 in one or two passages; while, on the other hand, he does, more than once, 

 use language which is consistent only with a full belief in spontaneous or 

 equivocal generation t- In fact, the main concern of Harvey's wonderful 

 little treatise is not with generation, in the physiological sense, at all, 

 but with development ; and his great object is the establishment of the 

 doctrine of epigeuesis. 



The first distinct enunciation of the hyjiothesis that all living matter has 

 sprung from preexisting living matter, came from a contemporary, though a 

 junior, of Harvey, a native of that countiy, fertile in men great in all de- 

 partments of human activity, which was to intellectual Europe in the six- 



* It is thus that Mr. Munro renders : — 



" Linquitur, ut merito niaternum nomen adepta 

 Terra sit, e terra quoniam sunt cuneta creata. 

 Multaque nunc etiam exsistunt animalia terris 

 Imbribus et calido solis concreta vapore." 



De Rerum Natura, lib. v. 793-79G. 



But TTOuld not the menning of the last line be better rendered " Developed in rain-water 

 and in the warm vapours raised by the sun ? " f 1 Corinthians, iv. 36. 



\ See the following passage in Exercitatio I. : — "Item sponfe nasccniia AKuniwr; non 

 quod ex 2}i(fredine oriunda sint : sed quod casu, naturaj sponte, et a^quivocS. (ut aiunt) 

 generatione, a parentibus sui dissimilibus proveniant." Again, in ' De Uteri Membranis' : — 

 " In cunctorum viventivim generatione (sicut diximus) hoc solenne est, ut ortum ducunt a 

 primordio aliquo, quod turn mnteriam turn efficiendi potestatem in se habet; sitque adeo 

 id, ex quo et a quo quicquid nascitur, ortum suum ducat. Tale primordium in anima- 

 libus {sive ab aliis generantibus 2>^'ovenianf, sive spotife, cnit c.v puti-cdhw iiasccntur) est 

 humor in tunica aliqua aut putamine conclusus." Compare also what Eedi has to say 

 respecting Harvey's opinions, 'Esperienzc,' p. 11. 



