animalculistn.adj.

1730 D. Turner Force Mother's Imagination upon Fœtus 141 I was lately in Company with one of these, a seminal Animalculist.

1739 J. Douglas Diss. Venereal Dis. Pt. III ii. 19 I shall not make a comparison between the animalculist (a crafty impudent quack described before) and our vermiculist Desault.

1772 N. D. Falck Treat. Venereal Dis. 254 What figures the animalculists would cut, I know not.

1879 tr. E. Haeckel Evol. Man I. ii. 37 The animalculists, or the believers in sperm, looked upon the moving seminal threads as the real animal germs.

1913 W. E. Kellicott Textbk. Gen. Embryol. i. 21 This idea was that within the germ, either in the egg (‘ovists’) or in the spermatozoön (‘spermists,’ ‘animalculists’) there was contained a miniature organism resembling..the adult form.

1947 Q. Rev. Biol. 22 200/1 Maupertuis..was led to this [sc. the epigenetic theory] by a consideration of the plain facts of biparental heredity, which..the ovists and animalculists attempted to explain away.

2001 Guardian 29 Mar. (Science section) 2/1 Like many scientists of his day, Spallanzani thought that all features of the embryo arrived preformed, either in the sperm or the egg—there was great debate between the opposing schools of ‘animalculists’ (who supported sperm) and ‘ovists’ (the league of egg men.)

1803 J. G. Dalyell tr. L. Spallanzani Tracts Nat. Hist. (ed. 2) II. 57 (note) But of the many hundred figures in his Animalcula Infusoria, a work that no animalculist can want, certainly there are none that may be confounded with the vermiculi.

1850 J. Ogilvie Imperial Dict. Animalculist, one versed in the knowledge of animalcules.

1835 R. Harlan Med. & Physical Res. 647 This ‘animalculist’ theory has long since been consigned to oblivion by the labours of Vallisnieri, Haller, and Spallanzani.

1890 Presbyterian & Reformed Rev. 1 353 When, over two centuries ago, the microscope revealed the spermatozoa,..the ‘animalculist’ philosophers fancied that these quasi-animalcules are the real germs.

1928 Amer. Naturalist 62 505 There is evidence from the writings of medical men that many of them accepted the Animalculist position.

1951 Proc. Royal Soc. B. 138 172 He [sc. Leeuwenhoek] was already deeply committed to the animalculist doctrine, and was firmly averse from considering the possibility of its rejection.

2002 Isis 93 490/2 She analyzes in detail the evolution of Haller's views on generation from animalculist preformationism to epigenesis and finally, from about 1755 on, to ovist preformationism.