possible to calculate how many individuals of each species had lived
in the period, and so had been packed inside the first being that was
created. The theory was consistently extended to man, and it was
affirmed that our common parent Eve had had stored in her ovary the
germs of all the children of men.

The theory at first took the form of a belief that it was the FEMALES
who were thus encased in the first being. One couple of each species
was created, but the female contained in her ovary all the future
individuals of the species, of either sex. However, this had to be
altered when the Dutch microscopist, Leeuwenhoek, discovered the male
spermatozoa in 1690, and showed that an immense number of these
extremely fine and mobile thread-like beings exist in the male sperm
(this will be explained in Chapter 2.7). This astonishing discovery
was further advanced when it was proved that these living bodies,
swimming about in the seminal fluid, were real animalcules, and, in
fact, were the pre-formed germs of the future generation. When the
male and female procreative elements came together at conception,
these thread-like spermatozoa ("seed-animals") were supposed to
penetrate into the fertile body of the ovum and begin to develop
there, as the plant seed does in the fruitful earth. Hence, every
spermatozoon was regarded as a homunculus, a tiny complete man; all
the parts were believed to be pre-formed in it, and merely grew larger
when it reached its proper medium in the female ovum. This theory,
also, was consistently developed in the sense that in each of these
thread-like bodies the whole of its posterity was supposed to be
present in the minutest form. Adam's sexual glands were thought to
have contained the germs of the whole of humanity.

This "theory of male scatulation" found itself at once in keen