Page:The Harveian Oration1876.djvu/30

 Harvey. We see it everywhere, in the vegetable and in the animal kingdom: suddenly from the contact of two cells of opposite sexes a formative power, as Harvey calls it, arises. The mother cell acquires in a second entirely new powers—it grows, differentiates, produces layer after layer, organ after organ, and all with a most wonderful regularity as to time and order, which holds good age after age in the different species of vegetables and animals. At length arise not only the wonderful machinery of the animal body, but the mind, which tries to investigate its own extraordinary action.

All attempts to explain this are mere concealments and subtleties of language. Harvey himself abandons in some degree his hold of facts, and looks upon the influence of the male cell on the female as a sort of “contagious effect,” which he refers to in his treatise on Conception as accomplished by “atoms, odorous particles, fermentation, or anything else—even something immaterial” But the giving this