opposition to the prevailing "female" theory. The two rival theories
at once opened a very lively campaign, and the physiologists of the
eighteenth century were divided into two great camps--the
Animalculists and the Ovulists--which fought vigorously. The
animalculists held that the spermatozoa were the true germs, and
appealed to the lively movements and the structure of these bodies.
The opposing party of the Ovulists, who clung to the older "evolution
theory," affirmed that the ovum is the real germ, and that the
spermatozoa merely stimulate it at conception to begin its growth; all
the future generations are stored in the ovum. This view was held by
the great majority of the biologists of the eighteenth century, in
spite of the fact that Wolff proved it in 1759 to be without
foundation. It owed its prestige chiefly to the circumstance that the
most weighty authorities in the biology and philosophy of the day
decided in favour of it, especially Haller, Bonnet, and Leibnitz.

Albrecht Haller, professor at Gottingen, who is often called the
father of physiology, was a man of wide and varied learning, but he
does not occupy a very high position in regard to insight into natural
phenomena. He made a vigorous defence of the "evolutionary theory" in
his famous work, Elementa physiologiae, affirming: "There is no such
thing as formation (nulla est epigenesis). No part of the animal frame
is made before another; all were made together." He thus denied that
there was any evolution in the proper sense of the word, and even went
so far as to say that the beard existed in the new-born child and the
antlers in the hornless fawn; all the parts were there in advance, and
were merely hidden from the eye of man for the time being. Haller even
calculated the number of human beings that God must have created on
the sixth day and stored away in Eve's ovary. He put the number at
200,000 millions, assuming the age of the world to be 6000 years, the