...for we live, move, have a being, and are subject to the actions of the elements, and the malice of diseases in that other world, the truest Microcosme, the wombe of our mother; for besides that generall and common existence wee are conceived to hold in our Chaos, and whilst wee sleepe within the bosome of our causes, wee enjoy a being and life in three distinct worlds, wherin we receive most manifest graduations: In that obscure world and wombe of our mother, our time is short, computed by the Moone, yet longer than the dayes of many creatures that behold the Sunne; our selves being yet not without life, sense, and reason; though for the manifestation of its actions it awaits the opportunity of objects; and seemes to live there but in its roote and soule of vegetation; entring afterwards upon the scene of the world, wee arise up and become another creature, performing the reasonable actions of man, and obscurely manifesting that part of Divinity in us, but not in complement and perfection, till we have once more cast our secondine, that is, this slough of flesh, and are delivered into the last world, that ineffable place of Paul, that proper _ubi_ of spirits. The smattering I have [in the knowledge] of the Philosophers stone ... hath taught me a great deale of Divinity, and instructed my beliefe, how the immortall spirit and incorruptible substance of my soule may lye obscure, and sleepe a while within this house of flesh. Those strange and mysticall transmigrations that I have observed in Silkewormes, turn'd my Philosophy into Divinity. There is in those workes of nature, which seeme to puzzle reason, something Divine, and [that] hath more in it then the eye of a common spectator doth discover.[30] To affirm that Sir Thomas Browne was the founder of chemical embryology or, indeed, to contend that he made a great impress upon the progress of embryology is to humour our fancy. As Browne himself reminds us, "a good cause needs not to be patron'd by a passion."[31] His work and interpretations of generation are most important for our purposes as an indication of the rising mood of the times and an emerging awareness of the physiochemical analysis of biological systems. Although this mood and awareness coexist in Browne's writings with a continued reverence for some traditional attitudes, they mark a point of departure toward a variety of embryological thought prominent in England during the second half of the seventeenth century.