Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/381

 range the natural matter in things that are internal, and supply fresh matter according to the several dimensions in the place of that which has been lost ? How can anything be affected or moved by that which does not touch it? Wherefore, with- out question, the same things happen in the engenderment of eggs which take place in the beginning of all living things whatsoever, viz.: they are primarily constituted by external and preexisting beings ; but so soon as they are endowed with life, they suffice for their own nourishment and increase, and this in virtue of peculiar inherent forces, innate, implanted from the beginning.

What has already been said of the vital principle appears clearly to proclaim that the egg is neither the work of the uterus, nor governed by that organ ; for it is manifest that the vegetative principle inheres even in the hypenemic egg, inas- much as we have seen that this egg is nourished and is pre- served, increases and vegetates, all of which acts are indications of the presence of the principle mentioned. But neither from the mother nor the uterus can this principle proceed, seeing that the egg has no connexion or union with them, but is free and unconnected, like a son emancipated from pupillage, rolling round within the cavity of the uterus and perfecting itself, even as the seeds of plants are perfected in the bosom of the earth, viz., by an internal vegetative principle, which can be nothing else than the vegetative soul.

And it will appear all the more certain that it is possessed of a soul or vital principle, if we consider by what compact, what moving power, the round and ample yelk, detached from the cluster of the ovary, descends through the infundibulum a most slender tube composed of a singularly delicate membrane, and possessed of no motory fibres and opening a path for itself, approaches the uterus through such a number of straits, arrived in which it continues to be nourished, and grows and is sur- rounded with albumen. Now as there is no motory organ dis- coverable either in the ovary which expels the vitellus, or in the infundibulum which transmits, or in the uterus which attracts it, and as the egg is not connected with the uterus, nor yet with the ovary by means of vessels, nor hangs from either by an umbilical cord, as Fabricius truly states, and demonstrates