The lateral production of plants by wires, while each new plant is thus chained to its parent, and continues to put forth another and another, as the wire creeps onward on the ground, is exactly resembled by the tape-worm, or taenia, so often found in the bowels, stretching itself in a chain quite from the stomach to the rectum.  Linnaeus asserts, “that it grows old at one extremity, while it continues to generate young ones at the other, proceeding ad infinitum, like a root of grass.  The separate joints are called gourd-worms, and propagate new joints like the parent without end, each joint being furnished with its proper mouth, and organs of digestion.”  Systema naturae.  Vermes tenia.  In this animal there evidently appears a power of reproduction without any maternal apparatus for the purpose of supplying nutriment and oxygenation to the embryon, as it remains attached to its father till its maturity.  The volvox globator, which is a transparent animal, is said by Linnaeus to bear within it sons and grand-sons to the fifth generation.  These are probably living fetuses, produced by the father, of different degrees of maturity, to be detruded at different periods of time, like the unimpregnated eggs of various sizes, which are found in poultry; and as they are produced without any known copulation, contribute to evince, that the living embryon in other orders of animals is formed by the male-parent, and not by the mother, as one parent has the power to produce it.

This idea of the reproduction of animals from a single living filament of their fathers, appears to have been shadowed or allegorized in the curious account in sacred writ of the formation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

From all these analogies I conclude, that the embryon is produced solely by the male, and that the female supplies it with a proper nidus, with sustenance, and with oxygenation; and that the idea of the semen of the male constituting only a stimulus to the egg of the female, exciting it into life, (as held by some philosophers) has no support from experiment or analogy.

III. 1.  Many ingenious philosophers have found so great difficulty in conceiving the manner of the reproduction of animals, that they have supposed all the numerous progeny, to have existed in miniature in the animal originally created; and that these infinitely minute forms are only evolved or distended, as the embryon increases in the womb.  This idea, besides its being unsupported by any analogy we are acquainted with, ascribes a greater tenuity to organized matter, than we can readily admit; as these included embryons are supposed each of them to consist of the various and complicate parts of animal bodies:  they must possess a much greater degree of minuteness, than that which was ascribed to the devils that tempted St. Anthony; of whom 20,000 were said to have been able to dance a saraband on the point of the finest needle without incommoding each other.