Eggs, instead of being parts generally found in every female, are therefore only instruments made use of by Nature to serve as the matrix in females which are deprived of that organ. Instead also of being active and essential to the first fecundation, they only serve as passive and accidental parts for the nutrition of the foetus already formed by the mixture of the liquor of the two sexes in a particular part of this matrix. Instead also of being existing bodies, inclosed, _ad infinitum_, one within the other, eggs, on the contrary, are bodies formed from the superfluity of a more gross and less organic part of the food, than that which produces the seminal and prolific liquor; and are in oviparous females something equivalent, not only to the matrix, but even to the menstrua in the viviparous. We should be perfectly convinced, that eggs are only destined by Nature to serve as a matrix in animals who have not that viscera, by those females producing eggs independant of the male. In the same manner as the matrix exists in viviparous animals, as a part appertaining to the female sex, hens, which have no matrix, have eggs in their room, which are successively produced of themselves, and necessarily exist in the female independently of any communication with the male. To pretend that the foetus is pre-existing in the eggs, and that these eggs are contained, _ad infinitum_, within each other, is nearly the same as to pretend that the foetus, is pre-existing in the matrix, and that the matrix of the first female inclosed all that ever were or will be produced.