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Loeb undertakes to prove that the organism as a whole acts automatically according to physicochemical laws. But he misses the question of evolution altogether. For example, he quotes Gudernatsch as having proved that legs can be induced to grow in tadpoles at any time, even in very young specimens, by feeding them with thyroid gland.
The studies of such individuals as John Standard reporting the weight of various parts of the hen's egg, e.g., the shell, the yolk, the white, reveal the wing of embryological investigation that was increasingly obsessed with quantification and the physicochemical analysis of the embryo and its vital functions.
The emphasis upon quantification and the physicochemical analysis of vital processes was to continue into the eighteenth century and to contribute to the great stress upon precision in that period. It was not, however, destined to become immediately the main stream of embryological investigation.
For it consists, essentially, in a more and more complete resolution of the grosser organs of the living body into physicochemical mechanisms.
This static approach was later supplanted by a more dynamic one concerned primarily with the physicochemical aspects of embryonic development. This is first apparent in a report by Robert Boyle in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1666 entitled, "A way of preserving birds taken out of the egge, and other small foetus's."
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