experiment of a notable vision that
often troubled me; some at Sossius Senecio's table suspected that I was
tainted with Orpheus's or Pythagoras's opinions, and refused to eat an
egg (as some do the heart and brain) imagining it to be the principle of
generation. And Alexander the Epicurean ridiculingly repeated,

To feed on beans and parents' heads
Is equal sin;

As if the Pythagoreans meant eggs by the word [Greek omitted] (BEANS),
deriving it from [Greek omitted](TO CONCEIVE), and thought it as
unlawful to feed on eggs as on the animals that lay them. Now to pretend
a dream for the cause of my abstaining, to an Epicurean, had been a
defence more irrational than the cause itself; and therefore I suffered
jocose Alexander to enjoy his opinion, for he was a pleasant man and an
excellent scholar.

Soon after he proposed that perplexed question, that plague of the
inquisitive, Which was first, the bird or the egg? And my friend Sylla,
saying that with this little question, as with an engine, we shook the
great and weighty problem (whether the world had a beginning), declared
his dislike of such questions. But Alexander deriding the question as
slight and impertinent, my relation Firmus said:. Well, sir, at present
your atoms will do me some service; for if we suppose that small things
must be the principles of greater, it is likely that the egg was before
the bird; for an egg amongst sensible things is very simple, and the
bird is more mixed, and contains a greater variety of parts. It is
universally true that a principle is before that whose principle it is;
now the seed is a principle, and the egg is somewhat more than the seed
and less than the bird for as a disposition or a progress in goodness is
something between a tractable mind and a habit of virtue, so an egg
is as it were a progress of Nature tending from the seed to a perfect
animal. And as in an animal they say the veins and arteries are formed
first, upon the same account the egg should be before the bird, as the
thing containing before the thing contained. Thus art first makes rude
and ill-shapen figures and afterwards perfects everything with its
proper form; and it was for this that the statuary Polycletus said, Then
our work is most difficult, when the clay comes to be fashioned by the
fingers. So it is probable that matter, not readily obeying the slow
motions of contriving Nature, at first frames rude and indefinite
masses, as the egg, and