Gassendi

"Accordingly, while the seed is still attached to the plant, since the soul of the plant is, as I have said, a spirituous, highly active substance all of whose parts communicate with one another in such a way that in whatever part of the plant it is, it contains the idea, so to speak, and impression of the other parts, the result is that it [800 starts] has this idea and impression particularly in the seed, as the part at which it aims first of all and in which it finally ends." (799-800)

"Hence the soul [of a new plant], which in the seed was a part of the whole soul [of the parent plant], so that in ripening it became such a one [as the whole soul] and an animula (little soul) in its own right (which ahd been transfused partly from the root and through all the parts along with the purest portion of the aliment and partly by means of its communication with the rest of the soul diffused through all parts of the plant), can be called an epitome, as it were, of the whole soul" (800)

"for of course the semen contains the thing itself, but contains it not unfolded, and in the form of rudiments" (802)

"I have said elsewhere that all things are stirred up by continual, internal, quivering movements and that even when things appear to be most at rest their internal principles are nevertheless perpetually struggling, unfolding themselves, revolving, and mixing, nothing forbids the creation by various combinations and couplings of those molecules which, because of the heat variously enclosed by them, become the seeds o the various things." (803)

"for, indeed, each one of them is a little machine within which are enclosed in a way impossible to comprehend almost innumerable [other] little machines, each with its own little motions." (806)