a
chain quite from the stomach to the rectum. Linnaeus asserts, "that it grows
old at one extremity, while it continues to generate young ones at the
other, proceeding ad infinitum, like a root of grass. The separate joints
are called gourd-worms, and propagate new joints like the parent without
end, each joint being furnished with its proper mouth, and organs of
digestion." Systema naturae. Vermes tenia. In this animal there evidently
appears a power of reproduction without any maternal apparatus for the
purpose of supplying nutriment and oxygenation to the embryon, as it
remains attached to its father till its maturity. The volvox globator,
which is a transparent animal, is said by Linnaeus to bear within it sons
and grand-sons to the fifth generation. These are probably living fetuses,
produced by the father, of different degrees of maturity, to be detruded at
different periods of time, like the unimpregnated eggs of various sizes,
which are found in poultry; and as they are produced without any known
copulation, contribute to evince, that the living embryon in other orders
of animals is formed by the male-parent, and not by the mother, as one
parent has the power to produce it.

This idea of the reproduction of animals from a single living filament of
their fathers, appears to have been shadowed or allegorized in the curious
account in sacred writ of the formation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

From all these analogies I conclude, that the embryon is produced solely by
the male, and that the female supplies it with a proper nidus, with
sustenance, and with oxygenation; and that the idea of the semen of the
male constituting only a stimulus to the egg of the female, exciting it
into life, (as held by some philosophers) has no support from experiment or
analogy.

III. 1. Many ingenious philosophers have found so great difficulty in
conceiving the manner of the reproduction of animals, that they have
supposed all the numerous progeny, to have existed in miniature in the
animal originally created; and that these infinitely minute forms are only
evolved or distended, as the embryon increases in the womb. This idea,
besides its being unsupported by any analogy we are acquainted with,
ascribes a greater tenuity to organized matter, than we can readily admit;
as these included embryons are supposed each of them to consist of the
various and complicate parts of animal bodies: they must possess a much
greater degree of minute