STORIES OF VIRGIN BIRTHS 227 



plants. Later, however, the sexuality of flowering plants 

 was taught by his pupils, and at the time of the 

 Roman Empire there was a very definite belief among 

 learned men (such as Pliny) that the larger plants and 

 animals reproduce by eggs or by seeds produced by the 

 females which require to be " fertilised " by a product 

 formed in the males — the spermatic fluid in the case of 

 animals and by the pollen in the case of a few flowering 

 plants {e.g. the date-palm). But there was no idea of 

 holding this as a general and universal law. From Pliny 

 to Harvey and later, those who concerned themselves with 

 natural history accepted without difficulty any strange 

 accounts or appearances as to the reproduction or the 

 sudden production in fanciful and astonishing ways of 

 the lower and smaller animals and plants. They did not 

 expect these inferior creatures to have the same methods 

 of reproduction as the higher and bigger creatures. It is 

 only now, since the later years of the nineteenth century, 

 that we are able to show that all animals and plants, even 

 the minutest microscopic kinds, reproduce by the formation 

 and separation of egg-cells, and that these egg-cells are 

 (in all but a few exceptional cases) fertilised by sperm- 

 cells, which are smaller than the egg-cells, and usually 

 provided with active swimming filaments. 



Not only did our mediaeval ancestors believe all sorts 

 of fancies as to the propagation of lower animals and 

 plants, but they were quite prepared to accept stories as 

 to reproduction in the case of higher animals, and even in 

 mankind, by irregular methods, such as parthenogenesis, 

 or the defect of an ordinary male parent. In the Middle 

 Ages in Europe, and earlier in the East, the belief in the 

 frequent occurrence of the birth of a child which had no 

 human male parent was common. It was, so to speak, an 

 admitted though irregular occurrence. A very curious 

 thing is that when such cases were supposed to occur, they 



