In all I have said, I constantly supposed the female furnished a seminal liquor, which was as necessary to generation as that of the male. I have endeavoured to establish in Chap. I. that every organized body must contain living organic particles, and I have endeavoured to prove Chap. II. and III. that nutrition and reproduction operates by the same cause; that nutrition is made by the intimate penetration of these organic particles through each part of the body, and that reproduction operates by the superfluity of these same organic particles collected together from all parts of the body and deposited in proper reservoirs. I have explained in Chap. IV. how this theory must be understood in the generation of man and animals which have sexes. Females then being organized bodies like males, they must also have some reservoirs for the superfluity of organic particles returned from every part of their bodies. This superfluity cannot come there through any other form than that of a liquor, since it is an extract of all parts of the body; and this liquor is that to which I have given the name of the female semen. This liquor is not, as Aristotle pretends, an infecund matter of itself, which enters neither as matter nor form into the business of generation, but as essentially prolific as that of the male, containing characteristic parts of the feminine sex, which the female alone can produce, the same as the male contains particles necessary to form the masculine organs; and each of them contains every other organic particle that can be looked on as common to both sexes; which causes that, by their mixture, the daughter may resemble her father, and the son his mother. This semen Hippocrates says, is composed of two liquors; the one strong, for the production of males; and the other weak, for the production of females. But this supposition is too extended; I do not see how it is to be conceived that a liquor, which is the extract of every part of the female body, should contain particles for the formation of the male organs. This liquor must enter by some way into the matrix of animals which bear and nourish their foetus within the body, and in others, as oviparous animals, it must be absorbed by the eggs, which may be looked upon as portable matrixes. Each of these matrixes contains a small drop of this prolific liquor of the female, in the part that is called the _cicatrice_. When there has been no communication with the male, this prolific drop collects under the form of a small mole, or mass, as Malpighius observes; but when impregnated by that of the male; it produces a foetus which receives its nutriment from the juices of the egg.