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This little book is the edition of 1651 of the 'Exercitationes de Generatione'; and if you were to add another little book, printed in the same small type, and about one-seventh of the thickness, you would have the sum total of the printed matter which Harvey contributed to our literature.
Speaking of Voltaire he says: 'It is the great failing of a strong imagination to catch greedily at wonders. Ib. vi. 455. See ante, i. 309, note 3, ii. 247, and Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 19, 1773. According to Mrs. The following plausible but over-prudent counsel on this subject is given by an Italian writer, quoted by 'Rhedi de generatione insectarum, with the epithet of 'divini poetæ:
Now as Linnaeus practically applied the idea of species with a sagacity which has never been surpassed and rarely equaled and indeed may be said to have fixed its received meaning in natural history, it may well be inferred that in the phrase above cited he did not so much undertake to frame a logical definition, as to set forth the idea which, in his opinion, lay at the foundation of species; on which basis A.L. Jussieu did construct a logical definition "Nunc rectius definitur perennis individuorum similium successio continuata generatione renascentium."
After careful search through the "Exercitationes de Generatione," the most that appears clear to me is, that Harvey believed all animals and plants to spring from what he terms a "primordium vegetale," a phrase which may nowadays be rendered "a vegetative germ"; and this, he says, is "oviforme," or "egg-like"; not, he is careful to add, that it necessarily has the shape of an egg, but because it has the constitution and nature of one.
William Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium, London, 1651. Karl Ernst von Baer, Ueber die Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere, Königsberg, 1828-37. With the second half of the seventeenth century and during a large part of the eighteenth the biological works of Aristotle attracted less attention.
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