Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/458

 intercourse and the first conception engendered by both pa- rents ; neither does he observe on the egg produced originally in the cluster of the vitellarium, and without any geniture, whe- ther proceeding from the male or the female, translated to the uterus. Neither does he understand that the uterus is, even after intercourse, completely empty of matter of every kind, whether transmitted by the parents, or produced by the inter- course, or transmuted in any way whatever. Neither had he read, or at all events he does not refer to the experiment of Fabricius, namely, that a hen is rendered so prolific by a few treads of the cock, that she will continue to lay fruitful eggs for the rest of the year, although in the interval she receives no new accessions of semen for the fecundation of each egg as it is laid, neither does she retain any of the seminal fluid which she received so long ago.

So much is certain, and disputed by no one, that animals, all those at least that proceed from the intercourse of male and female, are the offspring of this intercourse, and that they are procreated as it" seems by a kind of contagion, much in the same way as medical men observe contagious diseases, such as leprosy, lues venera, plague, phthisis, to creep through the ranks of mortal men, and by mere extrinsic contact to excite diseases similar to themselves in other bodies ; nay, contact is not necessary ; a mere halitus or miasm suffices, and that at a distance and by an inanimate medium, and with nothing sensibly altered : that is to say, where the contagion first touches, there it generates an " univocal" like itself, neither touching nor ex- isting in fact, neither being present nor conjunct, but solely because it formerly touched. Such virtue and efficacy is found in contagions. And the same thing perchance occurs iri the generation of animals. For the eggs of fishes, which come spontaneously to their full size extrinsically, and without any addition of male seminal fluid, and are therefore indubitably possessed of vitality without it, merely sprinkled and touched with the milt of the male, produce young fishes. The semen of the male, I say, is not intromitted in such wise as to per- form the part of " agent" in each particular egg, or to fashion the body, or to introduce vitality (anima) ; the ova are only fecundated by a kind of contagion. Whence Aristotle calls the milt of the male fish, or the genital fluid diffused in water, at