Our modern anatomists and physicians are of different sentiments from the ancients touching the woman’s contributing of seed for the formation of the child, as well as the man; the ancients strongly affirming it, but our modern authors being generally of another judgment. I will not make myself a party in this controversy, but set down impartially, yet briefly, the arguments on each side, and leave the judicious reader to judge for himself. Though it is apparent, say the ancients, that the seed of man is the principal efficient and beginning of action, motion, and generation, yet that the woman affords seed, and contributes to the procreation of the child, it is evident from hence, that the woman has seminal vessels, which had been given her in vain if she wanted seminal excrescence; but since nature forms nothing in vain, it must be granted they were made for use of seed and procreation, and fixed in their proper places, to operate, and contribute virtue and efficiency to the seed. But against all this, our modern authors affirm, that the ancients are very erroneous, inasmuch as the testicles in woman do not afford seed, but are two eggs, like those of fowls and other creatures; neither have they any such offices as in men, but are indeed an ovarium, or receptacle for eggs, wherein these eggs are nourished by the sanguinary vessels dispersed through them; and from thence one or more, as they are fecundated by the man’s seed, are conveyed into the womb by the ovaducts. And the truth of this, say they, is so plain, that if you boil them, the liquor will have the same taste, colour, and consistency, with the taste of birds’ eggs. And if it be objected, that they have no shells, the answer is easy; for the eggs of fowls, while they are in the ovary, nay, after they have fallen into the uterus, have no shell; and though they have one when they are laid, yet it is no more than a fence which nature has provided for them against outward injuries, they being hatched without the body; but those of women being hatched within the body, have no need of any other fence than the womb to secure them. They also further say, there are in the generation of the fœtus, or young ones, two principles, _active_ and _passive_; the _active_ is the man’s seed elaborated in the testicles, out of the arterial blood and animal spirit; the _passive_ principle is the ovum, or egg, impregnated by the man’s seed: for to say that women have true seed, say they, is erroneous. But the manner of conception is this: the most spirituous part of man’s seed, reaching up to the ovarium or testicles of the woman (which contains divers eggs, sometimes more, sometimes fewer), impregnates one of them; which being conveyed by the ovaducts to the bottom of the womb, presently begins to swell bigger and bigger, and drinks in the moisture that is plentifully sent thither, after the same manner that the seeds in the ground suck in the fertile moisture thereof, to make them sprout.