ovistn.adj.

1838 A. Thomson in Todd's Cycl. Anat. & Physiol. II. 427/1 According to..the Ovists, the female parent is held to afford all the materials necessary for the formation of the offspring.

1894 Science 9 Feb. 71/1 The fact..that a female aphide could produce offspring without coupling with a male seemed to give the ovists a convincing argument.

1928 Amer. Naturalist 62 505 The Ovists, with the weight of Harvey's dictum behind them, may on the whole be said to have predominated over the greater part of the eighteenth century.

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.

1993 R. Rucker et al. Mondo 2000 (U.K. ed.) 52/2 ‘Ovists’ thought that the complete homunculus resided in the woman's ovum, and that the sperm only served to irritate and waken this homunculus into growth.

1948 I. W. Knobloch Readings Biol. Sci. 181 ‘Emboitment’, the notion that, like box within box, all future structures were already present within the egg, presented no particular obstacle for a dyed-in-the-wool preformationist of the ovist school.

1982 E. Mayr Growth Biol. Thought xiv. 645 He [sc. J. G. Kölreuter] was the first to prove the equal contribution made by the two parents... He thus..conclusively refuted preformation, whether of the ovist or spermist variety.

2000 William & Mary Q. 57 299 Encasement, like preformation, came in both ovist and animalculist varieties.

1893 Westm. Gaz. 17 Mar. 7/1 The great gap was closed which Harvey's ovistic theory had left in the history of new growth.

1942 J. Needham Biochem. & Morphogenesis ii. 127 Bourguet, one of the saner ovistic preformationists.

1969 Isis 60 568/2 The rise of preformationism in its animalculistic and ovistic forms.