> as lemmas

1769 T. Smollett et al. tr. Voltaire Wks. XXVI. 212 The inhabitants were ignorant that elsewhere love might be infected with a destructive poison; that generation was attacked in its germ [Fr. les générations fussent attaquées dans leur germe].

1816 M. Keating Trav. (1817) I. 222 An apathy..nips all efforts at action in their germ.

1850 R. Belaney in Churchman's Pulpit 220/1 The sin, in germ, too, was there which made that sentence as perfectly just, as if we had each put forth our hands simultaneously with Adam's, to break the holy commandment of God.

1868 M. Pattison Suggestions Acad. Organisation v. 227 The idea exists in germ in the University itself.

1888 Q. Rev. July 127 Austria, with the help of Hanover, did her best to stifle the project in its germ.

1909 F. F. Abbott Society & Politics Anc. Rome 204 The practices which prevailed in the second and third centuries A.D. probably existed, in their germ at least, in student circles at Athens at the beginning of our era.

1944 C. G. Haines Role Supreme Court in Amer. Govt. & Politics, 1789–1835 i. iii. 97 In this opinion there is in germ at least the idea that a written constitution is a supreme law and, as such, is to be interpreted and enforced by the Judiciary.

1994 R. Omnès Interpr. Quantum Mech. iii. 114 The abstract formalism contains in germ a faithful description of all the real phenomena of physics.

2009 R. M. Berry in R. T. Eldridge Oxf. Handbk. Philos. & Lit. i. ix. 203 This preexistent autoproductivity in philosophy's origin, the necessity linking whatever something will become to what, in its germ, it already is.