"Indeed, where he appears to settle and determine with certainty what that may be in whatsoever seed, whether of plants or of animals, which renders the same fruitful, he rejects heat and fire as unfit for the work, but does not give recognition to any similar faculty, nor yet discover in the seed aught suitable for that duty; but is forced to admit something incorporeal, and coming from without, which shall act with understanding and foresight (like art or mind) to form the fœtus, and therein shall establish and order all things to a purpose and for the better. He betakes himself, I say, to something obscure and to us unknown, 'spirits included in the semen and in foaminess, and in the spirits the nature which is analogous to the element of the stars.' But what that may be he has nowhere taught us."[372] We have found that Aristotle describes "the element of the stars" as a "body,"[373] and that in the passage about the semen which Harvey quotes Aristotle expressly applies the same term, "body," to the analogue of the element of the stars.[374] Yet to this analogue Harvey seems to refer as "something incorporeal" in his last-quoted words, which tend to confound it with soul. Harvey agrees with Aristotle, however, in calling fire a "body";[375] and where in his Exercise On the Innate Heat he extols at some length[376] fire, air and water in motion as flame, wind and flood, he also sets forth how they each claim the title of spirits "by virtue of their movement and perpetual flux,"[377] and says:-- "These three, therefore, in so far as they acquire a certain life, appear to act beyond the powers of the elements and to have a share[378] of another and diviner body; wherefore they were reckoned among the deities by the heathen. For that of which the outcome is some extraordinary work, exceeding the bare faculties of the elements, that same they held to proceed from some diviner agent; as though it were one and the same to act beyond the powers of the elements and to have a share of another and diviner body--diviner, because it does not derive its origin from the elements."[379] Nowhere but in the third chapter of the second book of Aristotle's treatise On Generation does he refer to the analogue of the ether; and the complete text of this chapter--rugged, here and there, especially in Gaza's Latin translation--may help us perhaps to account for some of Harvey's efforts at exposition.[380] But when these and his reports of his predecessor's doctrines are compared with the words of Aristotle, Harvey and those other biologists of the Renaissance seem like sturdy children reaching forward in the dust, each still clasping a finger of the strong old father who strides among them. CHAPTER XI THE INNATE HEAT NOT DERIVED FROM ELEMENTAL FIRE