Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/377

 of the father, or a mixture of the two ? And here the greatest difficulties are occasioned by those eggs that are produced by the concurrence of animals of different species, as, for example, of the common fowl and pheasant. In such an egg, I ask, is it the vital principle of the father or that of the mother, which inheres ? or is it a mixture of the two ? But how can vital principles be mingled, if the vital principle (as form) be act and substance, which it is, according to Aristotle ? For no one will deny, whatever it be ultimately which in the fruitful egg is the beginning and cause of the effects we witness, that it is a substance susceptible of divers powers, forces, or faculties, and even conditions, virtues, vices, health and sickness. For some eggs are esteemed to be longer, others shorter lived ; some engender chickens endowed with the qualities and health of body that distinguished their parents, others produce young that are predisposed to disease. Nor is it to be said that this is from any fault of the mother, seeing that the diseases of the father or male parent are transferred to the progeny, although he contributes nothing to the matter of the egg; the procreative or plastic force which renders the egg fruitful alone proceeding from the male; none of its parts being contributed by him. For the semen which is emitted by the male during inter- course does by no means enter the uterus of the female, in which the egg is perfected ; nor can it, indeed, (as I first an- nounced, and Fabricius agrees with me,) by any manner or way get into the inner recesses of that organ, much less ascend as high as the ovary, near the waist or middle of the body, so that besides its peculiar virtue it might impart a portion of matter to the numerous ova whose rudiments are there contained. For we know, and are assured by unquestionable experience, that several ova are fecundated by one and the same connexion, not those only that are met with in the uterus and ovary, but those likewise that are in some sort not yet begun, as we shall state by and by, and indeed, as we have already had occasion to assert in our history.

If, therefore, an egg be rendered fruitful by its proper vital principle, or be endowed with its own inherent fecundating force, whence or whereby either a common fowl, or a hybrid betwixt the fowl and the pheasant is produced, and that either male or female, like the father or the mother, healthy or diseased ; we