two
glands; which might then be called male and female organs. But they
still collect and secrete their adapted particles from the same mass
of blood as in snails and dew-worms, but do not seem to be so placed
as to produce an embryon by the mixture of their secreted fluids, but
to require the mutual assistance of two hermaphrodites for that
purpose.

From this view-of the subject, it would appear that vegetables and
animals were at first propagated by solitary generation, and
afterwards by hermaphrodite sexual generation; because most vegetables
possess at this day both male and female organs in the same flower,
which Linneus has thence well called hermaphrodite flowers; and that
this hermaphrodite mode of reproduction still exists in many insects,
as in snails and worms; and, finally, because all the male quadrupeds,
as well as men, possess at this day some remains of the female
apparatus, as the breasts with nipples, which still at their nativity
are said to be replete with a kind of milk, and the nipples swell on
titillation.

Afterwards the sexes seem to have been formed in vegetables as in
flowers, in addition to the power of solitary reproduction by buds. So
in animals the aphis is propagated both by solitary reproduction as in
spring, or by sexual generation as in autumn; then the vegetable sexes
began to exist in separate plants, as in the classes monoecia and
dioecia, or both of them in the same plant also, as in the class
polygamia; but the larger and more perfect animals are now propagated
by sexual reproduction only, which seems to have been the
chef-d'oeuvre, or capital work of nature; as appears by the wonderful
transformations of leaf-eating caterpillars into honey-eating moths
and butterflies, apparently for the sole purpose of the formation of
sexual organs, as in the silk-worm, which takes no food after its
transformation, but propagates its species and dies.

III. _Recapitulation._

The microscopic productions of spontaneous vitality, and the next most
inferior kinds of vegetables and animals, propagate by solitary
generation only; as the buds and bulbs raised immediately from seeds,
the lycoperdon tuber, with probably many other fungi, and the polypus,
volvox, and taenia. Those of the next order propagate both by solitary
and sexual reproduction, as those buds and bulbs which produce flowers
as well as other buds or bulbs; and the aphis, and probably many other
insects. Whence it appears, t