The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to da Vinci, from Sharks’ Teeth to Frogs’ Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From

383 Pages·2017·18.64 MB·English

by  Edward Dolnick

Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Edward Dolnick
Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of
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DESIGNED BY LINDA MARK
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dolnick, Edward, 1952– author.
Title: Seeds of life : from Aristotle to Da Vinci, from sharks’ teeth to frogs’
pants, the long and strange quest to discover where babies come from / Edward
Dolnick.
Description: New York : Basic Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016054195| ISBN 9780465082957 (hardcover) | ISBN
9780465094967 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Human reproduction—History. | Human reproduction—
Mythology. | Human reproduction—Social aspects. | BISAC: SCIENCE /
History. | HISTORY Social History. | SCIENCE Life Sciences / General.
Classification: LCC QP251 .D59 2017 | DDC 612.6—dc23 LC record available
at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054195
LSC
E3-20170505-JV-PC
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Time Line
PROLOGUE England in the Early 1630s
PART ONE: PEERING INTO THE BODY
ONE Onward to Glory
TWO Hidden in Deep Night
THREE Swallowing Stones and Drinking Dew
FOUR Unmoored in Time
FIVE “Double, Double Toil and Trouble”
SIX Door A or Door B?
PART TWO: THE SEARCH FOR THE EGG
SEVEN Missing: One Universe (Reward to Finder)
EIGHT Sharks’ Teeth and Cows’ Eggs
NINE The Egg, At Last
TEN A World in a Drop of Water
ELEVEN “Animals of the Semen”
PART THREE: RUSSIAN DOLLS
TWELVE Dolls Within Dolls
THIRTEEN The Message in God’s Fine Print
FOURTEEN Sea of Troubles
FIFTEEN The Rabbit Woman of Godliman
SIXTEEN “All in Pieces, All Coherence Gone”
SEVENTEEN The Cathedral That Built Itself
EIGHTEEN A Vase in Silhouette
PART FOUR: THE CLOCKWORK TOPPLES AND A NEW THEORY
RISES
NINETEEN Frogs in Silk Pants
TWENTY A Drop of Venom
TWENTY-ONE The Craze of the Century
TWENTY-TWO “I Saw the Dull Yellow Eye of the Creature Open”
TWENTY-THREE The Nose of the Sphinx
TWENTY-FOUR “The Game Is Afoot”
TWENTY-FIVE Caught!
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Illustration Credits
Bibliography
Notes
Index
For Lynn, and Sam and Ben
Night and day, the ignorant as well as the learned give themselves over to
the pleasure of making children. But no one knows how he has
engendered his own progeny.
—VITTORE CARDELINI, Italian physician and author, 1628
TIME LINE
1490—Leonardo da Vinci makes a cutaway drawing of a man and woman
having sex.
1492—Columbus sets sail.
1543—Andreas Vesalius publishes one of the masterpieces in the history of
anatomy.
1543—Copernicus says that the Earth goes around the sun, not vice versa.
1628—William Harvey shows that the heart is a pump.
1651—Harvey declares that “everything comes from the egg.”
1669—Jan Swammerdam argues that God created all the generations of animals
at the dawn of time, one inside the next like Russian dolls.
1672—Regnier de Graaf (almost) proves that female mammals have eggs.
1674—Antony van Leeuwenhoek sees countless “tiny animals,” invisible to the
naked eye, in a drop of pond water.
1677—Leeuwenhoek sees spermatozoa by the millions.
1694—Nicolaas Hartsoeker draws a miniature man inside a sperm cell.
1741—Abraham Trembley cuts a tiny organism called a hydra into pieces.
Miraculously, each piece grows into a complete creature.
1745—French scientists propose a new theory of how living organisms develop:
life is regulated not by clockwork but by a force akin to gravity.
1752—Ben Franklin flies a kite during a thunderstorm and proves that lightning
is electrical.
1770s—Lazzaro Spallanzani puts male frogs in boxer shorts.
1776—American Revolution begins.
1791—Luigi Galvani zaps frog legs with electricity.
1818—Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein.
1827—Karl von Baer becomes the first to see a mammal’s egg.
1837—Queen Victoria takes the throne.
1830s–1860s—Cell theory emerges.
1861–1865—The American Civil War lasts four long years.
1875—Oscar Hertwig witnesses the union of sperm and egg.