Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/375

 imitable providence and art, and yet in an incomprehensible manner, always obtaining what is best both for simple being and for well-being, for protection also and for ornament. And all this not only in the fruitful egg which it fecundates, but in the hypenemic egg which it nourishes, causes to increase, and pre- serves. Nay, it is not merely the vitellus in the vitellarium or egg-bed, but the smallest speck whence the yelk is produced, of no greater size than a millet or a mustard-seed, that it nourishes and makes to grow, and finally envelopes with al- bumen, and furnishes with chalazse, and surrounds with mem- branes and a shell. For it is probable that even the barren egg, whilst it is included within the fowl and is connected with her, is nourished and preserved by its internal and inherent prin- ciple, and made to increase (not otherwise than the eggs of fishes and frogs, exposed externally, increase and are perfected), and to be tranformed from a small speck into a yelk, and transferred from the ovary to the uterus (though it have no connexion with the uterus), there to be endued with albumen, and at length to be completed with its chalazse, membranes, and shell.

But what that may be in the hypenemic egg as well as in the fruitful one, which in a similar manner and from the same causes or principles produces the same effects; whether it be the same soul, or the same part of the soul, or something else inherent in both, must be worthy of inquiry : it seems probable, however, that the same things should proceed from similar causes.

Although the egg whilst it is being produced is contained within the fowl, and is connected with the ovary of the mother by a pedicle, and is nourished by blood-vessels, it is not there- fore to be spoken of as a part of the mother ; nor is it to be held as living and vegetating through her vital principle, but by a virtue peculiar to itself and an internal principle ; just as fungi, and mosses, and the misletoe, which although they ad- here to vegetables and are nourished by the same sap as their leaves and germs, still form no part of these vegetables, nor are they ever so esteemed. Aristotle, with a view to meeting these difficulties, concedes a vegetative soul to the egg, even to the hypenemic one. He says i 1 " Females, too, and all things that live are endowed with the vegetative virtue of the soul, as has

1 Gener. Anim. lib. iii, cap. 7.