"Je laisse M. Darwin!"

But we cannot leave M. Flourens without calling our readers' attention
to his wonderful tenth chapter, "De la Preexistence des Germes et de
l'Epigenese," which opens thus:--

"Spontaneous generation is only a chimaera. This point established,
two hypotheses remain: that of 'pre-existence' and that of
'epigenesis'. The one of these hypotheses has as little foundation as
the other." (P. 163.)

"The doctrine of 'epigenesis' is derived from Harvey: following by
ocular inspection the development of the new being in the Windsor does,
he saw each part appear successively, and taking the moment of
'appearance' for the moment of 'formation' he imagined 'epigenesis'."
(P. 165.)

On the contrary, says M. Flourens (p. 167),

"The new being is formed at a stroke ('tout d'un coup') as a whole,
instantaneously; it is not formed part by part, and at different times.
It is formed at once at the single 'individual' moment at which the
conjunction of the male and female elements takes place."

It will be observed that M. Flourens uses language which cannot be
mistaken. For him, the labours of von Baer, of Rathke, of Coste, and
their contemporaries and successors in Germany, France, and England,
are non-existent: and, as Darwin "imagina" natural selection, so Harvey
" imagina" that doctrine which gives him an even greater claim to the
veneration of posterity than his better known discovery of the