 Not all preformationists took their preformationism quite so literally or graphically. But that view did present a competing alternative to Aristotelian epigenesis by the eighteenth century (see Bowler 1971, Pinto-Correia 1997). As Iris Fry has argued in her study of origins of life debates, only with preformation could a materialistic mechanist be a good Christian in the eighteenth century (Fry 2000: 26, citing Farley 1977: 29). This debate played out, for example, in the work of Caspar Friedrich Wolff and Charles Bonnet, both looking at chick development (Detlefsen 2006). They looked at the same thing and even fundamentally agreed about what they saw, but their conclusions were quite different. This story can be seen as a debate about scientific theory. Wolff was an epigenesist, maintaining that form emerges only gradually. Bonnet was a preformationist, insisting that form exists from the beginning of each individual organism and only experiences growth over time. In addition to these theoretical and epistemological issues, there is also a story about metaphysics. The eighteenth century brought debates between metaphysical materialists who were forced into preformationism, and epistemological epigenesists who observed form emerging only gradually and who were willing to accept vitalism as the only apparent causal explanation for the emergence of form from the not-formed (Roe 1981; Maienschein 2000; Nicoglou &amp; Wolfe 2018 [and references therein]; Wolfe 2021).