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Updated: May 20, 2025
In this early formation of the embryon from the irritabilities, sensibilities, and associabilities, and consequent appetencies, the faculty of volition can scarcely be supposed to have had its birth. For about what can the fetus deliberate, when it has no choice of objects?
In this animal there evidently appears a power of reproduction without any maternal apparatus for the purpose of supplying nutriment and oxygenation to the embryon, as it remains attached to its father till its maturity. The volvox globator, which is a transparent animal, is said by Linnæus to bear within it sons and grand-sons to the fifth generation.
Others have supposed, that all the parts of the embryon are formed in the male, previous to its being deposited in the egg or uterus; and that it is then only to have its parts evolved or distended as mentioned above; but this is only to get rid of one difficulty by proposing another equally incomprehensible: they found it difficult to conceive, how the embryon could be formed in the uterus or egg, and therefore wished it to be formed before it came thither.
"Owing to the imperfection of language the offspring is termed a new animal, but is in truth a branch or elongation of the parent, since a part of the embryon animal is, or was, a part of the parent, and therefore, in strict language, cannot be said to be entirely new at the time of its production; and therefore it may retain some of the habits of the parent system.
And that hence when these become combined with a new embryon, which in its early state is not furnished with stomach, or glands, to alter them; that new embryon will bear some resemblance to the mother. This seems to be the origin of the compound forms of mules, which evidently partake of both parents, but principally of the male parent.
These organic particles he believes to be in constant activity, till they become mixed in the womb, and then they instantly join and produce an embryon or fetus similar to the two parents. Many objections might be adduced to this fanciful theory, I shall only mention two. First, that it is analogous to no known animal laws.
There is, however, another final cause, to which this circumstance may be imputed: it was observed above, that vegetable buds and bulbs, which are produced without a mother, are always exact resemblances of their parent; as appears in grafting fruit-trees, and in the flower-buds of the dioiceous plants, which are always of the same sex on the same tree; hence those hermaphrodite insects, if they could have produced young without a mother, would not have been, capable of that change or improvement, which is seen in all other animals, and in those vegetables, which are procreated by the male embryon received and nourished by the female.
Sensitive. Hence sympathy, and all our virtues. Contagious matter of venereal ulcers, of hydrophobia, of jail-fever, of small-pox, produced by imitation, and the sex of the embryon. 4. Irritative imitation. 5. Imitations resolvable into associations.
"At the earliest period of its existence the embryon would seem to consist of a living filament with certain capabilities of irritation, sensation, volition, and association, and also with some acquired habits or propensities peculiar to the parent; the former of these are in common with other animals; the latter seem to distinguish or produce the kind of animal, whether man or quadruped, with the similarity of feature or form to the parent."
"Join sense unto reason," he cries, "and experiment unto speculation, and so give life unto embryon truths and verities yet in their chaos.... What libraries of new volumes after-times will behold, and in what a new world of knowledge the eyes of our posterity may be happy, a few ages may joyfully declare."
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