The Mansion of Happiness (6 page)

William Harvey was keenly interested in discovering the secrets of generation, but not by way of
piss prophecy. He wanted to bring to this question deduction, reason, and experiment. He started by speculating.

“A
Man
, was first a
Boy
,” he began. “Before he was a
Boy
, he was an
Infant;
and before an
Infant
, an
Embryo.
” So far, so good. “Now we must search farther,” he urged, venturing into the unknown. “What hee was in his Mothers Womb, before he was this
Embryo
, or
Foetus;
whether
three bubbles
? or some
rude
and
indigested lump
?
or a
conception
, or
coagulation
of
mixed seed
? or whether any thing else?”

Following
Aristotle and Fabricius, Harvey first sought the answer by cracking open hens’ eggs, which were “cheap merchandize,” and ready to hand.
¹⁶
He may have begun this work on first returning to England from Padua, even before he took up his study of the circulation of the blood. He regretted that he was unable to
gather evidence about his own species, “for we are almost quite debarred of dissecting the humane
Uterus.
” Even barnyard animals were hard to come by: “to make any inquiry concerning this matter, in
Horses, Oxen, Goats
, and other Cattel, cannot be without a great deal of paines and expense.” Fortunately, King Charles liked to hunt. “Our late Sovereign King
Charls
, so soon as he became a Man, was wont for Recreation, and
Health sake, to
hunt
almost every week, especially the
Buck
and
Doe.
” From the king’s gamekeeper, Harvey claimed his catch: does, in the rutting season. “I had a daily oportunity of dissecting them, and of making inspection and observation of all their
parts.
” Evidence suggests that Harvey’s very good friend
Thomas Hobbes attended at least one of these dissections.
¹⁷
(In his will, Harvey left Hobbes ten pounds, “to buy something to keepe in remembrance of mee.”) The king, too, found Harvey’s work fascinating and “was himself much delighted in this kind of
curiosity, being many times pleased to be an eye-witness, and to assert my new inventions.” Even the queen took an interest. “I saw
long since a foetus of the magnitude of a Pease-cod, cut out of the uterus of a Doe,” Harvey wrote. “I shewed this pretty Spectacle and Rarity of Nature to our late King and Queen. It did swim, trim and perfect, in such a kinde of White most transparent, and crystaline moysture (as if it had been treasured up in some most clear glassie receptable) about the bigness of a Pigeons egge.” Harvey had seen human fetuses, too, including one “wherein the
Embryo
, who was as long as the
naile
of the
little finger
, did appear like a small
frogge:
having a
broad body
, a
wide mouth
, and his
armes
and
leggs
newly shot forth, like the young
buds
of
flowers.
” And there was more:

Harvey’s descriptions are marvelous. A fetus was like a frog, a flower bud, a turkey egg, a large bean, something like milk, covered with leather, with a snout like a dog’s. Still, while the human fetuses, like the spectacle of deer embryos floating in egg-shaped sacs as clear as glass, were wonderful, what Harvey was really looking for was an egg.

The famed circulator of the lesser world considered it a fallacy to believe, as most anatomists did, that different sorts of animals derived from different things: birds from eggs; vermin from worms; men from seeds. No, he insisted, they all came from eggs, even if, in some creatures, those eggs are incubated inside and, in others, out. He knew that this claim ran “counter to the common received tenets.” In fact, it bordered on anatomical heresy.
“An egg,” he believed, turning prevailing wisdom on its head, “is the Common Original of All Animals.”
¹⁹

He didn’t expect everyone to agree with him. At the time, all sorts of people were challenging ancient knowledge of the natural world and challenging, too, the very nature of knowledge, and even its limits. What could be known was what could be investigated, demonstrated, and explained.
²⁰
Harvey’s theory of circulation
(which, like his theory of generation, happens to have been right) did not gain easy or ready acceptance, partly because no one, not even Harvey, could explain what circulation was
for.
Harvey told Aubrey, “Twas beleeved by the vulgar that he was crack-brained.”
²¹

Anticipating that his idea about eggs would be still more controversial, he was reluctant to publish his study of generation. And he never got around to publishing another book, which was to be called
The Loves, Lusts, and Sexual Acts of Animals.
²²
Not until the end of 1648 was he persuaded to prepare his treatise for publication. He was, by then, an
old man, in considerable pain, suffering from gout, and burdened with disappointment. His wife had died. England was at war with itself. In 1649, while Harvey worked on his manuscript, Charles was beheaded, leaving the future of the monarchy uncertain. For a time, Harvey was banished from London. In a portrait taken to serve as an illustration for his new book, Harvey, a dying royalist, looked so miserable that, in the end, the likeness was left out. Then Harvey, who “believed
it lawful to put an end to his life when tired of it,” tried to kill himself by taking an overdose of laudanum. He failed.
²³

Harvey’s
De Generatione animalium
was published, in Latin, in 1651. It was to be his lasting legacy, his own act of generation. A dedicatory poem noted at once Harvey’s intellectual fecundity, his childlessness—“Thy
Brain
hath
Issue
, though thy
Loins
have none”—and the parentless state of England: “Let fraile
Succession
be the Vulgar care; / Great
Generation’s
selfe is now
thy
Heire.
”
²⁴

This analogy—between a theory of generation and a hereditary monarchy—was not uncommon. The state has been thought of as a body for a long time; in English, the phrase “
body politic” dates to the fifteenth century. Anatomy is a good place for the discussion—literally, the embodiment—of a political order.
²⁵
Harvey’s
Generatione
was published the same year as Hobbes’s
Leviathan.
In
Leviathan
, Hobbes postulated the existence of a primordial state of nature—a place, very much like Jamestown, where life is poor, nasty, brutish, and short—against which the leviathan, artificial man, civil society, is formed. “Life is but a motion of Limbs,” Hobbes wrote, “the beginning whereof is in some
principal part
within.” The leviathan, the state, is “but an artificial man,” healthy in times of peace, sickened by treason, and felled by civil war.
²⁶
In
Generatione
, Harvey attempted to deduce a state of nature, within the womb, out of which man was formed. In a state of nature, man is an egg.

But Harvey had not found an egg. When he dissected does that had just mated, he never found anything in their uteruses. Not female seed, not male seed. Weeks later, he did find something; he found an embryo. But he thought he had found something else, and he called what he found, in Latin, an
ovum
, a word that, before then, had been used only to talk about birds’ eggs.
²⁷
(Aubrey: “He wrote very bad Latin.”)
²⁸
In 1653, Harvey’s Latin treatise was translated into English, and that
ovum
, the origins of life, an anatomical Eden, became an “egg.” But nothing inside the book made Harvey’s point so well as its frontispiece, which pictured Zeus opening an
egg, out of which hatched all manner of creatures: a grasshopper, a lizard, a bird, a snake, a deer, a butterfly, a spider, and a baby. “
Ex ovus omnia
,” read the motto: Everything from an egg.
²⁹

“We shall call these vesicles
ova
, on account of the exact similitude which they exhibit to the eggs contained in the
ovaries of birds,” the Dutch anatomist
Regnier de Graaf wrote, in 1672, when he finally found the egg Harvey was looking for—or, at least, when he thought he had found it, although what he had actually found is what is now called the ovarian follicle.
³⁰
With de Graaf, what used to be called “female testicles” were renamed “ovaries.” Harvey appeared to be triumphing. But Harvey, who died of a stroke in 1657, was right to worry that people would think he was crack-brained.

“Man comes not from an egg,”
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek insisted in 1683, “but from an animalcule in the masculine seed.”
³¹
He had seen it himself. The microscope was invented in Holland between 1591 and 1608, and the Dutch Leeuwenhoek was the finest microscope maker in the world. He was not trained as an
anatomist, but what he saw with his lenses led him, in letters to London’s
Royal Society, to challenge the authority of “your Harvey and our de Graaf.”
³²
He reported on the eye of a bee and the nose of a louse. He made a particular subject of himself. He looked at “a hair taken from my eyelid”; he looked at his spit.
“I have often viewed the
Sweat
of my face,” he wrote.
³³
And then he looked at
semen (the product, he took pains to point out, not of
masturbation but of intercourse) and reported
that he’d found in it “animalcules,” tiny animals.
³⁴
They could swim; they had heads and tails; they were microscopic men.

After that, it took rather a long time for anatomists to work out what men and women contribute to generation. But from Harvey and Leeuwenhoek, for all their differences, emerged, eventually, a consensus: women aren’t men turned inside out, as
Galen had thought. Women don’t have testicles, like men; they have
ovaries, like hens. Women don’t make seeds; they make eggs.
³⁵
Hobbes had argued that in a state of nature, there are no natural rulers—not a king over his people, not man over woman. Men enter a political state when they consent to be governed. But women don’t consent to a government of men; they aren’t even part of it. Women, therefore, must be not lesser men, not lesser members of the
body politic,
but no members at all.
³⁶
“In everything not connected with sex, woman is man,” Rousseau wrote. “In everything connected with sex, woman and man are in every respect related but in every respect different.”
³⁷
But different, how? The
poet who supplied the dedication to Harvey’s
Generatione
put it best:

Women are a great deal like men, except when they’re more like
chickens.

“I shall begin at the beginning,” says the director of the Hatchery, while giving a tour to a group of students, in the opening chapter of
Brave New World
,
Aldous Huxley’s 1931 novel. The idea that eggs can exist outside of women’s bodies was a mainstay of twentieth-century
science fiction. “
Begin at the beginning
,” Huxley’s students dutifully write in their
notebooks. The tour continues: “ ‘These,’ he waved his hand, ‘are the incubators.’ And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. ‘The week’s supply of ova.’ ” In Huxley’s dark and terrible world, yet another new world, there are no mothers and no fathers, no families at all. Humans are conceived in the laboratory, and fetuses grow in test tubes.
³⁹

Huxley’s fiction was ahead of science, but not by all that much. Before
human eggs could be incubated, they had to be found.
Aristotle had studied chickens; Harvey, deer. After Harvey, there followed something of an egg hunt. In 1827, a German scholar named
Karl von Baer finally found a
mammalian egg, the ovum of a dog. “Led by curiosity,” he wrote, “I opened one
of the follicles and took up the minute object on the point of my knife, finding that I could see it very distinctly and that it was surrounded by mucus. When I placed it under the microscope I was utterly astonished, for I saw an ovule … so clearly that a blind man could hardly deny it.”
⁴⁰

Meanwhile,
Charles Darwin was undertaking his own investigation of genesis.
The Origin of Species
was published in 1859.
Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby
, a children’s book that doubled as a defense of Darwinism, was published four years later. The Huxley children, including Aldous and Julian, read it, not least because it featured a scene in which their grandfather
T. H. Huxley, a supporter of
Darwin’s, inspects a baby in a bottle. “Dear Grandpater,”
Julian Huxley wrote to his grandfather when he was four, “have you seen a Water-baby? Did you put it in a bottle? Did it wonder if it could get out? Can I see it some day? Your loving JULIAN.”
⁴¹