f the hair and feathers of animals by
domestication, may be caused in the same manner by the imagination of the
mother.

6. The living filament is a part of the father, and has therefore certain
propensities, or appetencies, which belong to him; which may have been
gradually acquired during a million of generations, even from the infancy
of the habitable earth; and which now possesses such properties, as would
render, by the apposition of nutritious particles, the new fetus exactly
similar to the father; as occurs in the buds and bulbs of vegetables, and
in the polypus, and taenia or tape-worm. But as the first nutriment is
supplied by the mother, and therefore resembles such nutritive particles,
as have been used for her own nutriment or growth, the progeny takes in
part of the likeness of the mother.

Other similarity of the excitability, or of the form of the male parent,
such as the broad or narrow shoulders, or such as constitute certain
hereditary diseases, as scrophula, epilepsy, insanity, have their origin
produced in one or perhaps two generations; as in the progeny of those who
drink much vinous spirits; and those hereditary propensities cease again,
as I have observed, if one or two sober generations succeed; otherwise the
family becomes extinct.

This living filament from the father is also liable to have its
propensities, or appetencies, altered at the time of its production by the
imagination of the male parent; the extremities of the seminal glands
imitating the motions of the organs of sense; and thus the sex of the
embryon is produced; which may be thus made a male or a female by affecting
the imagination of the father at the time of impregnation. See Sect. XXXIX.
6. 3. and 7.

7. After the fetus is thus completely formed together with its umbilical
vessels and placenta, it is now supplied with a different kind of food, as
appears by the difference of consistency of the different parts of the
white of the egg, and of the liquor amnii, for it has now acquired organs
for digestion or secretion, and for oxygenation, though they are as yet
feeble; which can in some degree change, as well as select, the nutritive
particles, which are now presented to it. But may yet be affected by the
deficiency of the quantity of nutrition supplied by the mother, or by the
degree of oxygenation supplied to its placenta by the maternal blood.

The augmentation of the complete fetus by additional particles of nutriment
i