This liquor is not, as Aristotle pretends, an infecund matter of itself, which enters neither as matter nor form into the business of generation, but as essentially prolific as that of the male, containing characteristic parts of the feminine sex, which the female alone can produce, the same as the male contains particles necessary to form the masculine organs; and each of them contains every other organic particle that can be looked on as common to both sexes; which causes that, by their mixture, the daughter may resemble her father, and the son his mother. This semen Hippocrates says, is composed of two liquors; the one strong, for the production of males; and the other weak, for the production of females. But this supposition is too extended; I do not see how it is to be conceived that a liquor, which is the extract of every part of the female body, should contain particles for the formation of the male organs.
This liquor must enter by some way into the matrix of animals which bear and nourish their fœtus within the body, and in others, as oviparous animals, it must be absorbed by the eggs, which may be looked upon as portable matrixes. Each of these matrixes contains a small drop of this prolific liquor of the female, in the part that is called the cicatrice. When there has been no communication with the male, this prolific drop collects under the form of a small mole, or mass, as Malpighius observes; but when impregnated by that of the male; it produces a fœtus which receives its nutriment from the juices of the egg.
Eggs, instead of being parts generally found in every female, are therefore only instruments made use of by Nature to serve as the matrix in females which are deprived of that organ. Instead also of being active and essential to the first fecundation, they only serve as passive and accidental parts for the nutrition of the fœtus already formed by the mixture of the liquor of the two sexes in a particular part of this matrix. Instead also of being existing bodies, inclosed, ad infinitum, one within the other, eggs, on the contrary, are bodies formed from the superfluity of a more gross and less organic part of the food, than that which produces the seminal and prolific liquor; and are in oviparous females something equivalent, not only to the matrix, but even to the menstrua in the viviparous.
We should be perfectly convinced, that eggs are only destined by Nature to serve as a matrix in animals who have not that viscera, by those females producing eggs independant of the male. In the same manner as the matrix exists in viviparous animals, as a part appertaining to the female sex, hens, which have no matrix, have eggs in their room, which are successively produced of themselves, and necessarily exist in the female independently of any communication with the male. To pretend that the fœtus is pre-existing in the eggs, and that these eggs are contained, ad infinitum, within each other, is nearly the same as to pretend that the fœtus, is pre-existing in the matrix, and that the matrix of the first female inclosed all that ever were or will be produced.
Anatomists have taken the word egg in several acceptations and meanings. When Harvey took for his motto, Omnia ex ovo, he understood by the word egg, as applied to viviparous animals, the membrane which includes the fœtus and all its appendages: he thought, he perceived this egg, or membrane, form immediately after the copulation of the male and the female. But this egg does not proceed from the ovium of the female; and he has even maintained, that he did not remark the least alteration in this testicle, &c. We perceive there is here nothing like what is commonly understood by the word egg unless the figure of the bag may be supposed to have some resemblance thereto. Harvey, who dissected so many viviparous females, did not, he says, ever perceive any alteration in the ovaria; he looked on them even as small glands, perfectly useless to general ion,[Y] although they undergo very remarkable changes and alterations in them, since we may perceive in cows the glandular bodies grow from the size of a millet seed to that of a cherry. This great anatomist was led into this error by the smallness of the glandular bodies in the species of deer, to which he principally paid his attention. C. Peyerus, who also made many experiments on them, says, "Exigui quidem sunt damarum testiculi, sed post coitum fœcundum, in alterutro eorum, papilla, sive tuberculum fibrosum, semper succrescit; scrofis autem prægnantibus tanta accidit testiculorum mutatio, ut mediocrem quoque attentionem fugere nequeat."[Z] This author imagines, with some reason, that the minuteness of the testicles of does, is the cause of Harvey's not having remarked the alterations; but he is wrong in advancing that the alterations he had remarked, and which had escaped Harvey's notice, did not happen till after impregnation.
[Y] See Harvey Exercit. 64 and 65.
[Z] Vide Conradi Peyeri Merycologia.
It appears that Harvey was deceived in many other essential points; he asserts, that the seed of the male does not enter into the matrix of the female, and even that it cannot; yet Verheyen found a great quantity of the male seed in the matrix of a cow, which he dissected six hours after copulation.[AA] The celebrated Ruysch asserts, that having dissected a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery, and was assassinated, he found, not only in the cavity of the matrix, but also in the trunks, a quantity of the seminal liquor of the male,[AB] Valisnieri affirms, that Fallopius and other anatomists had also discovered male seed in the matrix of many women. After the positive testimony of these great anatomists, there can remain no doubt but Harvey was deceived in this important point; especially when to these are added that of Leeuwenhoek, who found the male seed in the matrix of a great number of females of different species.
[AA] See Verheyen Sup. Anat. Tra. v. cap. iii.