 From this moment on, the figure of Pereira acquired a relevance like never before. Even if Bayle tried to show the unmethodical way in which the doctor of Medina del Campo expressed his doctrine of animals’ lack of sensory perception, the fact is that it did not take the opponents of Descartes long to spread the suspicion that he had plagiarized some of the contents of the Antoniana Margarita. This accusation was known to the extent that Adrien Baillet, the great biographer of the French philosopher, was obliged to claim that the doctrine of animal mechanism had already been conceived by the young Descartes before he had the opportunity to know of the existence of Pereira’s book (Baillet 1691: vol. I, p. 51 ff.). However, it has been maintained that neither the chronological observations of Baillet nor the denial expressed by Descartes himself of having read Pereira’s work completely rules out the possibility that he could have read Pereira’s book in the Netherlands, where it was probably more accessible than in France. Those chronological reasons of Baillet were not accepted by many others, such as Huet, who openly stated that Pereira had clearly anticipated Descartes in the theory of animal automatism (Huet 1689 [1734: 193 ff.]).