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Webster 1913 Edition

Noun.

(Biol.)

A believer in the doctrine, formerly current, of encasement in the male (see

), in which the seminal thread, or spermatozoid, was considered as the real animal germ, the head being the true animal head and the tail the body.

spermist ‎(plural spermists)

(historical) One who believed that the complete human being was contained in the sperm rather than the ovum.
- 2009 March 27, Vivien Schweitzer, “Night of New York Debuts, and a Farewell”, in New York Times:
  Esa-Pekka Salonen, in his wry program notes for his “Homunculus” (2007) for string quartet, writes that he has long “been fascinated (and amused) by the theory of the arcane spermists, who held the belief that the sperm was in fact a ‘little man’ (homunculus) that was placed inside a woman for growth into a child.”