Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/427

 existence with the punctum saliens, and at the same time, seems to be as well a part of the chick, and a kind of efficient or instrument of its generation, inseparable, as Fabricius thinks, from the agent. But how the egg may be called the efficient and instrument of generation, has partly been explained already, and will be illustrated more copiously by what we shall presently say.

So much has been fully established in our history, that the punctum pulsans and the blood, in the course of their growth, attach round themselves the rest of the body, and all the other members of the chick, just as the yelk in the uterus, after being evolved from the ovary, surrounds itself with the Avhite ; and this not without concoction and nutrition. Now the common instrument of all vegetative operations, is, in the opinion of all men, an internal heat or calidum innatum, or a spirit diffused through the whole, and in that spirit a soul or faculty of a soul. The egg, therefore, beyond all doubt, has its own operative soul, which is all in the whole, and all in each individual part, and contains within itself a spirit or animal heat, the immediate instrument of that soul. To one who should ask then, how the chick is made from the egg, we answer : after all the ways recited by Aristotle, and devised by others, in which it is possible for one thing to be made from another.

EXERCISE THE FORTY-FOURTH.

Fabricius is mistaken with regard to the matter of the generation of the chick in ovo.

As I proposed to myself at the outset, I continue to follow Fabricius as pointing out the way; and we shall, therefore, consider the three things which he says are to be particularly regarded in the generation of the chick, viz. : the agent, the matter, and the nourishment of the embryo. These must needs be all contained in the egg ; he proposes various doubts or questions, and quotes the opinions of the most weighty authorities in regard to them, these opinions being