Wherefore, taught by experience, I rather incline to the opinion of Aristotle; for the albumen is not merely perceived as added in the way Fabricius will have it, but fashioned also, distinguished by chalazæ and membranes, and divided into two different portions; and all this in virtue of the inherence of the same vegetative vital principle by which the egg is more conspicuously divided into two distinct substances—a yelk and a white. For the same faculty that presides over the formation of the egg in general, presides over the constitution of each of its parts in particular. Neither is it altogether true that the yelk is first formed and the albumen added to it afterwards; for what is seen in the ovary is not the vitellus of the egg, but rather a compound containing the two liquids mingled together. It has the colour of the vitellus, indeed, but in point of consistence it is more like the albumen; and when boiled hard it is not friable like the proper yelk, but, like the white, is concreted, jelly-like, and seen to be composed of thin lamellæ; and it has a kind of white papula, or spot, in the middle.
Aristotle seems to derive this separation from the dissimilar nature of the yelk and white; for he says,[231] as we have already stated, that if a number of eggs be thrown into a pan and boiled, in such wise that the heat shall not be quicker than the separation of the eggs, (citatior quam ovorum distinctio,) the same thing will take place in the mass of eggs which occurs in the individual egg: the whole of the yelks will set in the middle, the whites round about them.
This I have myself frequently found to be true on making the trial, and it is open to any one to repeat the experiment; let him only beat yelks and whites together, put the mixture into a dutch oven, or between two plates over the fire, and having added some butter, cause it to set slowly into a cake, he will find the albumen covering over the yelks situated at the bottom.
EXERCISE THE THIRTY-EIGHTH.
Of what the cock and hen severally contribute to the production of the egg.
Both cock and hen are to be reputed parents of the chick; for both are necessary principles of an egg, and we have proved both to be alike its efficient: the hen fashions the egg, the cock makes it fertile. Both, consequently, are instruments of the plastic virtue by which this species of animal is perpetuated.
But as in some species there appears to be no occasion for males, females sufficing of themselves to continue the kind; so do we discover no males among these, but females only, containing the fertile rudiments of eggs in their interior; in other species, again, none but males are discovered which procreate and preserve their kinds by emitting something into the mud, or earth, or water. In such instances nature appears to have been content with a single sex, which she has used as an instrument adequate to procreation.
Another class of animals has a generative fluid fortuitously, as it were, and without any distinction of sex; the origin of such animals is spontaneous. But “as some things are made by art, and some depend on accident, health for example,”[232] so also some semen of animals is not produced by the act of an individual agent, as in the case of a man engendered by a man; but in some sort univocally, as in those instances where the rudiments and matter, produced by accident, are susceptible of taking on the same motions as seminal matter, as in “animals which do not proceed from coitus, but arise spontaneously, and have such an origin as insects which engender worms.”[233] For as mechanics perform some operations with their unaided hands, and others not without the assistance of particular tools; and as the more excellent and varied and curious works of art require a greater variety in the form and size of the tools to bring them to perfection, inasmuch as a greater number of motions and a larger amount of subordinate means are required to bring more worthy labours to a successful issue—art imitating nature here as everywhere else, so also does nature make use of a larger number and variety of forces and instruments as necessary to the procreation of the more perfect animals. For the sun, or Heaven, or whatever name is used to designate that which is understood as the common generator or parent of all animated things, engenders some of themselves, by accident, without an instrument, as it were, and equivocally; and others through the concurrence of a single individual, as in those instances where an animal is produced from another animal of the same genus which supplies both matter and form to the being engendered; so in like manner in the generation of the most perfect animals where principles are distinguished, and the seminal elements of animated beings are divided, a new creation is not effected save by the concurrence of male and female, or by two necessary instruments. Our hen’s egg is of this kind; to its production in the perfect state the cock and the hen are necessary. The hen engenders in herself, and therefore does she supply place and matter, nutriment and warmth; but the cock confers fecundity; for the male, as Aristotle says,[234] always perfects generation, secures the presence of a sensitive vital principle, and from such an egg an animal is engendered.
To the cock, therefore, as well as to the hen, are given the organs requisite to the function with which he is intrusted; in the hen all the genital parts are adapted to receive and contain, as in the cock they are calculated to give and immit, or prepare that which transfers fecundity to the female, he engendering, as it were, in another, not in himself.
When we anatomize the organs appropriated to generation, therefore, we readily distinguish what each sex contributes in the process; for a knowledge of the instruments here leads us by a direct path to a knowledge of their functions.