_Of the Method to be pursued in studying Generation._
Since in Animal Generation, (and, indeed, in all other subjects upon which information is desired,) inquiry must be begun from the causes, especially the material and efficient ones, it appears advisable to me to look back from the perfect animal, and to inquire by what process it has arisen and grown to maturity, to retrace our steps, as it were, from the goal to the starting place; so that when at last we can retreat no further, we shall feel assured that we have attained to the principles; at the same time we shall perceive from what primary matter, and from what efficient principle, and in what way from these the plastic force proceeds; as also what processes nature brings into play in the work. For primary and more remote matter, by abstraction and negation (being stripped of its garments as it were) becomes more conspicuous; and whatever is first formed or exists primarily in generation, is the material cause of everything that succeeds. For example, before a man attains to maturity, he was a boy, an infant, an embryo. And then it is indispensable to inquire further as to what he was in his mother’s womb before he was an embryo or fœtus; whether made up of three bubbles, or a shapeless mass, or a conception or coagulum proceeding from the mingled seminal fluids of his parents, or what else, as we have it delivered to us by writers. In like manner, before a fowl had attained to maturity or perfection,--because capable of engendering its like,--it was a chicken; previous to which it was an embryo or fœtus in the egg; and before this, Hieronymus Fabricius, of Aquapendente, has observed rudiments of the head, eyes, and spine. But when he asserts that the bones are formed before the muscles, heart, liver, lungs, and precordial parts, and contends that all the internal organs must exist before the external ones, he follows probabilities according to previous notions rather than inspection; and quitting the evidences of sense that rest on anatomy, he seeks refuge in reasonings upon mechanical principles; a procedure that is anything but becoming in a great anatomist, whose duty it was faithfully to narrate the changes he observed taking place day by day in the egg, up to the period when the fœtus is perfected; and this the rather as he expressly proposed to himself to write the history of the formation of the chick in the egg, and to exhibit in figures what happens in the course of each successive day. It would have been in harmony with such a design, I say, had we been informed, on the testimony of the senses, of what parts are formed first, together, or subsequently in the egg; and not had mere opinions or musty conjectures, and the instances of houses and ships, adduced in illustration of the order and mode of formation of the parts.