...containing the same particles, but cruder and lesse digested, from a cruder matter, by lesse perfect Organs, is left more terrene, furnished with more material parts; which being united in the womb, with the spiritual particles of the masculine seed; everyone being rightly, according to his proper place, disposed and ordered with the other; fixes and conjoynes those spiritual Atomes, that they still afterwards remain in that posture they are placed in.[18]
The theories of development promulgated by Digby and Highmore reveal the chief formulations of mechanistic rationalism, more or less free of empiricism, that were emerging as the vitalism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries waned. There was little new in these theories: both Digby's and Highmore's theories included different combinations of elements of ancient lineage. Digby's concept was essentially free of vitalistic coloring; akin to the embryological efforts of Descartes in its virtual independence from observations of the developing embryo, it was similarly vulnerable to Voltaire's criticism of Descartes, that he sought to interpret, rather than study, Nature. This criticism is not so applicable to Highmore, whose theory of development is more vitalistic than Digby's, and is more akin to the concepts developed by Gassendi than those of Descartes. Highmore had experience with the embryo itself, and his actual contribution as an observer of development, although hardly epochal, is worthy of note. But despite this empirical base, Highmore has final recourse to a hypothesis blending many ancient ideas and substituting the Aristotelian material and efficient causes for the "fortune and chance" he objected to in Digby's hypothesis. It was not easy in the seventeenth century to avoid falling back upon some variety of cause or force.
In 1651, about two months before publication of Highmore's History of Generation, a work appeared which marks another period in seventeenth-century English embryology. William Harvey, De Motu Cordis almost a quarter of a century behind him, now published De Generatione Animalium, the work he said was calculated "to throw still greater light upon natural philosophy."[19] This book is, perhaps, not as well known as Harvey's treatise demonstrating circulation of the blood, but it is an important work in the history of embryology and it occupies a prominent position in the body of English embryological literature.
In De Generatione, Harvey provides a thorough and quite accurate account of the development of the chick embryo, which, in particular, clarified that the chalazae, those twisted skeins of albumen at either end of the yolk, were not, as generally believed, the developing embryo, and he demonstrated that the cicatricula (blastoderm) was the point of origin of the embryo. The famous frontispiece of the treatise shows Zeus holding an egg, from which issue animals of various kinds. On the egg is written Ex ovo omnia, a legend since transmuted to the epigram Omne vivum ex ovo. The legend illustrates Harvey's principal theme, repeated constantly throughout the text, "that all animals were in some sort produced from eggs."[20]
If Harvey made no contribution beyond emphasizing the origin of animals from eggs, he would deserve a prominent place in the history of embryology. But the work is also significant in its espousal of epigenesis, and, supported as his argument was by observation and logic, it became the prime formulation of that concept of development during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His statement of epigenetic development is clear:
In the egg ... there is no distinct part or prepared matter present, from which the fetus is formed ... an animal which is created by epigenesis attracts, prepares, elaborates, and makes use of the material, all at the same time; the processes of formation and growth are simultaneous ... all its parts are not fashioned simultaneously, but emerge in their due succession and order ... Those parts, I say, are not made similar by any successive union of dissimilar and heterogeneous elements, but spring out of a similar material through the process of generation, have their different elements assigned to them by the same process, and are made dissimilar ... all its parts are formed, nourished, and augmented out of the same material.[21]
Actually, Harvey's exposition of epigenesis, albeit clear, is not totally impressive, since it is largely a reflection of Aristotle's influence. The main importance of Harvey's vigorous and cogent defense of epigenesis is that it provided some kind of counterbalance to the increasingly dominant preformationist interpretations of embryonic development.
Harvey did not break with Aristotelianism; on the contrary, he lent considerable authority to it. Unable to escape the past, he was not completely objective in his study of generation. Everywhere the pages of his book reveal his indebtedness to past authorities. Robert Willis, who provided the 1847 translation of De Generatione, expresses this well:
[Harvey] ... begins by putting himself in some sort of harness of Aristotle, and taking the bit of Fabricius between his teeth; and then, either assuming the ideas of the former as premises, or those of the latter as topics of discussion or dissent, he labours on endeavouring to find Nature in harmony with the Stagyrite, or at variance with the professor of Padua—for, in spite of many expressions of respect and deference for his old master, Harvey evidently delights to find Fabricius in the wrong. Finally, so possessed is he by scholastic ideas, that he winds up some of his opinions upon animal reproduction by presenting them in the shape of logical syllogisms.[22]
Even Harvey's concept of the egg reveals a strong Aristotelian bias. Actually, Harvey attained to his conclusion that all animals derive from eggs by assuming that