Below and to the left are Dante’s verses describing the development of a human embryo as he understood it in his day (early 1300’s). To the right is my simplified, parallel wording, granted without the poetic grace of Dante or his skilled translators, but hopefully more easily followed. Note that Dante accepted the Galenian belief of his day that blood only moves one direction in the body--that it formed in the heart and moved to the extremities of the body, where it turned into other body fluids, such as sweat, and in this case semen. (William Harvey did not propose circulation of blood until 1628.) More to our point, Dante had accepted, apparently also from the science of his day, the concept that the human embryo goes through progressively more complex stages resembling lower life forms, until reaching the human body form. This was 550 years before Ernst Haeckel’s famous conclusion, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (The course of embryo development tends to repeat the history of the organism's evolutionary development). As a consequence, and illustrated in verses 66-74, Dante has also accepted the idea that God does not put a soul into the organism, making it human, until the last stage of development. This is a prime example of how Christians often accept the "science" of their times as fact, and adjust their theology to conform, regardless of how Scripture might literally say the opposite.