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first to do so since Aristotle. But Harvey had greater ambitions. Charles I delighted in hunting the red deer that roamed, and still roam, the Royal Parks of England, and he allowed Harvey to dissect his victims. Harvey followed the progress of the deer embryo month by month, and left one of the loveliest descriptions of a mammalian foetus ever written. ‘I saw long since a foetus,’ he writes, ‘the magnitude of a peascod cut out of the uterus of a doe, which was complete in all its members & I showed this pretty spectacle to our late King and Queen. It did swim, trim and perfect, in such a kind of white, most transparent and crystalline moysture (as if it had been treasured up insome most clear glassie receptacle) about the bignesse of a pigeon’s egge, and was invested with its proper coat.’ The King apparently followed Harvey’s investigations with great interest, and it is a poignant thought that when Charles I was executed, England lost a monarch with a taste for experimental embryology, a thing not likely to occur again soon.
    The frontispiece of Harvey’s embryological treatise,
De generatione animalium
(1651), shows mighty Zeus seated upon an eagle, holding an
egg
in his hand from which all life emerges. The
egg
bears the slogan
Ex Ovo Omnia
– from the egg, all – and it is for this claim, that the generation of mammals and chickens and everything else is fundamentally alike, that the work is today mostly remembered, even though Harvey neither used the slogan himself nor proved its truth. Harvey has some things to say about monstrous births. He revives, and queries, Aristotle’s claim that monstrous chickens are produced from eggs with two yolks. This may not seem to amount to much, but it was the expression of an idea, dormant for two millennia, that the causes of monstrosity are not just a matter for idle speculation of the sort that Paré and Liceti dealt in, but are instead an experimentally tractable problem.
    It was, however, a contemporary of Harvey’s who stated the true use of deformity to science – and did so with unflinching clarity. This was Francis Bacon. Sometime Lord Chancellor of England, Bacon comes down to us with a reputation as the chilliest of intellectuals. His ambition was to establish the principles by which the scientific inquiry of the natural world was to be conducted. In his
Novum organum
of 1620 Bacon begins byclassifying natural history. There are, he says, three types of natural history: that which ‘deals either with the
Freedom
of nature or with the
Errors
of nature or with the
Bonds
of nature; so that a good division we might make would be a history of
Births
, a history of
Prodigious Births
, and a history of
Arts
; the last of which we have also often called the
Mechanical
and the
Experimental
Art’. In other words, natural history can be divided into the study of normal nature, aberrant nature and nature manipulated by man. He then goes on to tell us how to proceed with the second part of this programme. ‘We must make a collection or particular natural history of all the monsters and prodigious products of nature, of every novelty, rarity or abnormality.’ Of course, Bacon is interested in collecting aberrant objects not for their own sake, but in order to understand the causes of their peculiarities. He does not say
how
to get at the causes – he simply trusts that science will one day provide the means.
    Bacon’s recommendation that ‘monsters and prodigious products’ should be collected would not have startled any of his contemporaries. Princes such as Rudolf II and Frederick II of Austria had been assembling collections of marvels since the mid-1500s. Naturalists were at it too: Ulisse Aldrovandi had assembled no fewer than eighteen thousand specimens in his musem at Bologna. Bacon’s proposal that the causes of oddities should be investigated was equally conventional. The depth of his thinking is, however, apparent when he turns to
why
we should