Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1997

Inner visionsThe Ovary of Eve: Eggs and Sperm and Preformationby Clara Pinto-CorreiaUniversity of Chicago Press: 1997. Pp. 376. $29.95

Frank Gonzalez-Crussi

How do we come into being? Few questionsare as fundamental, or as appealing to theimagination, as this one. The process bywhich we are shaped into existence is a phenomenon at once commonplace andportentous. Millions are conceived andmillions born every day, following anunvarying plan. Yet who could fail to befilled with wonder when confronted by thespectacle of an inchoate, tiny germ thatdevelops symmetry, forms eyes, sproutslimbs and ultimately becomes a fullyformed individual?

Considering the inexhaustible sugges-tiveness of this process, and the amount offolly, passion, fantasy, wild speculation andserious investigative effort that it has givenrise to, it is surprising that relatively few read-able historical accounts have been written.True, histories of embryology have beencompiled before, but most fail to do justice tothe multi-hued tints and ramifications thattheir subject matter offers at every juncture.This deficiency is amply corrected by ClaraPinto-Correia.

Her engrossing book is likely to remainfor many years the most readable and infor-mative — certainly the most enjoyable —account of the early scientific efforts toexplain human conception. This is not sur-prising. As a professor of developmentalbiology, the author has the necessary back-ground to assess the relative importance ofthe various contributions; as an establishednovelist and poet, she brings to the task clear,agile prose, and a gifted eye for vivid, evoca-tive and memorable material.

When old ideas and hypotheses, no mat-ter how exalted, are superseded by new evi-dence, they must be cast aside. This attitudeis inherent in the much-revered scientificmethod, and is no doubt commendable inthe scientist. The historian, however, oughtto prize the obsolete. Yet, when describingdiscarded hypotheses, historians oftensound steeped in the conviction that they aremerely chronicling past errors. Their tonetends to turn contemptuous, and the readersenses their amazement at the credulity of ourforebears, by whom the absurd, far-fetchednotions were sustained.

It is a strength of The Ovary of Eve that itsucceeds in fully appropriating the view-point of the scientists of the past, and makesthe reader realize the nobility, the earnest-ness, the inevitability and the beauty of manyof their constructs, even those condescend-

ingly dismissed as ‘foolishness’ by less per-ceptive historians. “It is a sad fact,” the authortells us in the prologue, “that history is writ-ten by the victors. In this book, I want to chal-lenge this trend, and tell the marvellous storyof the losers.”

‘Marvellous’ is right, and rendered moreso by the lively style of the narrative. But, asthe book comes to an end, it is by no meansclear that there are winners and losers. Thereader is made to realize that the confronta-tion between preformationism and epigen-esis is far from over; that the fundamentalconcepts remain the same, even though thewarring factions take on a different guiseeach time; and that we are not quite throughwith mulling the notion, first propoundedearly in the present century, that ontogenesisis “a cytoplasmic epigenesis, underlain by anuclear preformationism”.

Or, as Stephen Jay Gould asserts in theforeword, our present view of morphogene-sis is epigenetic but, to the extent that weacknowledge a pre-existing ‘blueprint’ thatdirects all activities, preformationism maystill be said to be alive and well and domiciledin the nucleus.

The subtitle, Eggs and Sperm and Prefor-mation, is inaccurate. The book is muchbroader in scope and richer than that. We seeLazzaro Spallanzani fitting frogs with boxer

shorts to ascertain the role of semen in fecun-dation (but to the end believing that spermcells were mere contaminants). We find themicroscopists — Leeuwenhoek, Hartsoekerand Du Bois-Regard — expounding theirideas and flinging sarcasm at each other. Andwhereas Ambroise Paré and UlisseAldrovandi explain the causation of mon-strous births, Vandermonde, eugenist avantla lettre, enlightens us on the ways to perfectthe human species.

But there is much more. Reference toHartsoeker’s ‘homunculus’ leads to consid-erations on the Egyptian goddess Ka, thework of the Arab alchemist Jâbir Ibn Hâyan,the Jewish myth of the Golem, FrancescoRedi’s experiments on generation, the fairytales of François de la Plantade and so on.Interesting and erudite connections aboundin each of the eight engrossing chapters.

The book is an individual and idiosyn-cratic work. That may be one of the reasonswhy it accomplishes so well the ends thatVandermonde, according to the prologue,wished for his own production: “To firstdetain the reader before novel and amusingobjects, that in treading the path of beauty hemay arrive effortlessly to that of science.”Frank Gonzalez-Crussi is in the Department ofPathology, Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago,Illinois 60614, USA.

NATURE | VOL 390 | 6 NOVEMBER 1997 41

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Human fetus in a sperm from Nicolas Hartsoeker’s Essay de Dioptrique (1694), which is largely atreatise on optics and optical instruments. His extreme preformation theory proposed that “the firstmales would have been created with all those… that would be born until the end of the centuries”.