 The various accounts offered in the subsequent “theory of the earth” tradition, as they were amplified by such natural philosophers as John Ray (1627–1705), John Woodward (1665–1728), and William Whiston (1667–1752), failed to achieve a consensus position on the question of a naturalistic explanation of the origins of organisms (Rudwick 1972, 2005). New reflections on the embryological origin of the individual organism in the seventeenth-century provided a particular point of focus, and the reflections on this issue were closely tied to speculations about species origins.