Dimensions
129 x 198 x 1mm
The story of the seventeenth-century scientists who solved one of the great mysteries of the age: generation and reproduction, and the discovery of human sperm and egg.
For thousands of years people believed all sorts of strange things about reproduction -- snakes and mice were thought to appear from dirt and it was widely assumed that women could give birth to cats or rabbits. In this world there appeared to be no rules underlying the generation of life.
But all this confusion was blown away by a flurry of discovery in the mid-seventeenth century, made by a small group of European scientists who used experiments and the newly discovered microscope to study the mystery of life. In just one decade they shoed that like bred like, that all animals -- including humans -- come from an egg, that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation, and that there are millions of tiny wriggling 'eels' in semen. At last, the building blocks for understanding how reproduction occurs were in place. But in one of the great ironies of science, it would be another 150 years before the full meaning of their findings became clear.
