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Highmore's book is an important one in the history of embryology, since it is the first treatment of embryogeny from the atomistic viewpoint and because it contains the first published observations based upon microscopic examination of the chick blastoderm.
In 1620, Digby's last year of study at Oxford University, Fienus published a work, De Formatrice Foetus, designed to demonstrate that the human embryo receives the rational soul on the third day after conception and to discuss at length such subjects as the efficient cause of embryogeny and the proposition that the conformation of the fetus is a vital, not a natural, action.
The correspondence between comparative embryogeny and comparative anatomy would remain too. Therefore biology could and would continue to establish between living forms the same relations and the same kinship as transformism supposes to-day. It would be, it is true, an ideal kinship, and no longer a material affiliation.
In short, abundant provisions and spacious cells yield females; scanty provisions and narrow cells yield males. This is a law upon which I may henceforth rely. At the stage which we have now reached a question arises, a question of major importance, touching the most nebulous aspect of embryogeny.
Each felt compelled to challenge the immediate authority, and yet their intellectual isolation from the past was incomplete, and their views on embryogeny corresponded with more often than they differed from those of the person they railed against.
From the incrassation upon incubation when heat diffuseth the coagulum, from the chalaza or gallatine wh. containeth 3 nodes, the head, heart, & liver. It cannot be said that Browne attained to any great generalizations regarding embryogeny on the basis of his rather naive experiments, but they are indicative of the effects of the "new learning" in one area of biology.
Paleontology, in spite of the insufficiency of its evidence, invites us to believe it has; for, where it makes out the order of succession of species with any precision, this order is just what considerations drawn from embryogeny and comparative anatomy would lead any one to suppose, and each new paleontological discovery brings transformism a new confirmation.
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