The Works of William Harvey M.D. / Translated from the Latin with a life of the author

by William Harvey

It is a common mistake with those who pursue philosophical studies in these times, to seek for the cause of diversity of parts in diversity of the matter whence they arise. Thus medical men assert that the several parts of the body are both engendered and nourished by diverse matters, either the blood or the seminal fluid; viz. the softer parts, such as the flesh, by the thinner matter, the harder and more earthy parts, such as the bones, &c. by the firmer and thicker matter. But we have elsewhere refuted this too prevalent error. Nor do they err less who, with Democritus, compose all things of atoms; or with Empedocles, of elements. As if generation were nothing more than a separation, or aggregation, or disposition of things. It is not indeed to be denied, that when one thing is to be produced from another, all these are necessary, but generation itself is different from them all. I find Aristotle to be of this opinion; and it is my intention, by-and-by, to teach that out of the same albumen (which all allow to be uniform, not composed of diverse parts,) all the parts of the chick, bones, nails, feathers, flesh, &c. are produced and nourished. Moreover, they who philosophize in this way, assign a material cause [for generation], and deduce the causes of natural things either from the elements concurring spontaneously or accidentally, or from atoms variously arranged; they do not attain to that which is first in the operations of nature and in the generation and nutrition of animals; viz. they do not recognize that efficient cause and divinity of nature which works at all times with consummate art, and providence, and wisdom, and ever for a certain purpose, and to some good end; they derogate from the honour of the Divine Architect, who has not contrived the shell for the defence of the egg with less of skill and of foresight than he has composed all the other parts of the egg of the same matter, and produced it under the influence of the same formative faculty.

Although what has already been said be the fact, namely, that the egg, even whilst contained in the uterus, is provided with a hard shell, still the authority of Aristotle has always such weight with me that I never think of differing from him inconsiderately; and I therefore believe, and my observations bear me out in so much, that the shell does gain somewhat in solidity from the ambient air upon its extrusion; that the sluggish and slippery fluid with which it is moistened when laid, immediately becomes hardened on its exposure to the air. For the shell, whilst the egg is in the uterus, is much thinner and more transparent, and smoother on the surface; when laid, however, the shell is thicker, less translucid, and the surface is rough—it appears as if it were powdered over with a fine white dust which had but just adhered to it.

Let us, as we are upon this subject, expatiate a little:—

In the desert islands of the east coast of Scotland, such flights of almost every kind of sea-fowl congregate, that were I to state what I have heard from parties very worthy of credit, I fear I should be held guilty of telling greater stories than they who have committed themselves in regard to the Scottish geese produced, as they say, from the fruits of certain trees that had fallen into the sea. These geese the narrators themselves had never seen so produced; but I will here relate that which I have myself witnessed.

There is a small island which the Scots call the Bass Island (and speaking of this one will suffice for all), situated in the open ocean, not far from the shore, of the most abrupt and precipitous character, so that it rather resembles one huge rock or stone than an island, and indeed it is not more than a mile in circumference. The surface of this island in the months of May and June is almost completely covered with nests, eggs, and young birds, so that you can scarce find free footing anywhere; and then such is the density of the flight of the old birds above, that like a cloud they darken the sun and the sky; and such the screaming and din that you can scarce hear the voice of one who addresses you. If you turn your eyes below, and from your lofty stance and precipice regard the sea, there you perceive on all sides around an infinite variety of different kinds of sea-fowl swimming about in pursuit of their prey: the face of the ocean is very like that of a pool in the spring season, when it appears swarming with frogs; or to those sunny hills and cliffy mountains looked at from below, that are covered with numerous flocks of sheep and goats. If you sail round the island and look up, you see on every ledge and shelf, and recess, innumerable flocks of birds of almost every size and order; more numerous than the stars that appear in the unclouded moonless sky; and if you regard the flights that incessantly come and go you may imagine that it is a mighty swarm of bees you have before you. I should scarcely be credited did I name the revenue which was annually derived from the feathers, the eggs, and the old nests, which, as useful for firing, are all made objects of traffic by the proprietor; the sum he mentioned to me exceeds credibility. There was this particular feature which, as it refers to our subject, I shall mention, and also as it bears me out in my report of the multitudes of sea-fowl: the whole island appears of a brilliant white colour to those who approach it,—all the cliffs look as if they consisted of the whitest chalk; the true colour of the rock, however, is dusky and black. It is a friable white crust that is spread over all, which gives the island its whiteness and splendour, a crust, having the same consistency, colour, and nature as an egg-shell, which plasters everything with a hard, though friable and testaceous kind of covering. The lower part of the rock, laved by the ebbing and flowing tide, preserves its native colour, and clearly shows that the whiteness of the superior parts is due to the liquid excrements of the birds, which are voided along with the alvine fæces; which liquid excrements, white, hard, and brittle like the shell of the egg, cover the rock, and, under the influence of the cold of the air, incrust it. Now this is precisely the way in which Aristotle and Pliny will have it that the shell of the egg is formed. None of the birds are permanent occupants of the island, but visitors for purposes of procreation only, staying there for a few weeks, in lodgings, as it were, and until their young ones can take wing along with them. The white crust is so hard and solid, and adheres so intimately to the rock, that it might readily be mistaken for the natural soil of the place.

The liquid, white, and shining excrement is conveyed from the kidneys of birds by the ureters, into the common receptacle or cloaca; where it covers over the alvine fæces, and with them is discharged. It constitutes, in fact, the thicker portion of the urine of these creatures, and corresponds with that which, in our urine, we call the hypostase or sediment. We have already said something above on this topic, and have entered into it still more fully elsewhere. We always find an abundance of this white excrement in mews; where hawks besmear walls beside their perches, they cover them with a kind of gypseous crust, or make them look as if they were painted with white lead.

In the cloaca of a dead ostrich I found as much of this gypseous cement as would have filled the hand. And in like manner the same substance abounds in tortoises and other oviparous animals; discharged from the body it soon concretes either into a friable crust, or into a powder which greatly resembles pulverized egg-shells, in consequence of the evaporation of its thinner part.

Among the many different kinds of birds which seek the Bass island for the sake of laying and incubating their eggs, and which have such variety of nests, one bird was pointed out to me which lays but one egg, and this it places upon the point of a rock, with nothing like a nest or bed beneath it, yet so firmly that the mother can go and return without injury to it; but if any one move it from its place, by no art can it be fixed or balanced again; left at liberty, it straightway rolls off and falls into the sea. The place, as I have said, is crusted over with a white cement, and the egg, when laid, is bedewed with a thick and viscid moisture, which setting speedily, the egg is soldered as it were, or agglutinated to the subjacent rock.

An instance of like rapid concretion may be seen any day at a statuary’s, when he uses his cement of burnt alabaster or gypsum tempered with water; by means of which the likeness of one dead, or the cast of anything else may be speedily taken, and used as a mould.

There is also in like manner a certain earthy or solid something in almost all liquids, as, for example, tartar in wine, mud or sand in water, salt in lixivium, which, when the greater portion of the water has been dissipated, concretes and subsides; and so do I conceive the white sediment of birds to descend along with the urine from the kidneys into the cloaca, and there to cover over and incrust the egg, much as the pavement of a mews is plastered over by falcons, and every cliff of the aforementioned island by the birds that frequent it; much also as chamber utensils, and places where many persons make water, become covered with a yellow incrustation; that substance, in fact, concreting externally, of which calculi in the kidneys, bladder, and other parts are formed. I did formerly believe then, as I have said, persuaded especially by the authority of Aristotle and Pliny, that the shell of the hen’s egg was formed of this white sediment, which abounds in all the oviparous animals whose eggs are laid with a hard shell, the matter concreting through contact with the air when the egg was laid. And so many additional observations have since strengthened this conclusion, that I can scarcely keep from believing that some part at least of the shell is thus produced.