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 vivifying 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. 



