primordium
Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
- noun An organ or a part in its most rudimentary form or stage of development.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- noun Beginning; commencement; origin.
- noun In botany, the ultimate beginning of any structure.
- noun In embryology, the first trace of a future organ.
Examples
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A mass of cells form a structure called the primordium and these divide extensively as new plant organs and tissues are formed.
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At this point -- one not merely theoretical, or speculatively possible only, but absolutely fixed and determinable in our backward survey of the vital forces of nature -- we find individual parentage lost in a natural matrix, or in the vital principle implanted as a "primordium," in the earth itself.
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The whole controversy, as at present conducted by the materialists and vitalists, resolves itself into this one question: -- Whether life springs from what Dr. Harvey calls a "primordium," -- a pre-existing vital germ or unit -- or whether it originates _de novo_, as the materialists assert, from infusions contained in their experimental flasks, or from plastide particles contained in protoplasmic matter, or from the still more daring hypothesis of "molecular machinery" as worked by molecular force?
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For example "From their first rudiment, or primordium, to the termination of their lives, all animals undergo perpetual transformations; which are in part produced by their own exertions in consequence of their desires and aversions, of their pleasures and their pains, or of irritation, or of associations; and many of these acquired forms or propensities are transmitted to their posterity."
Note
The word 'primordium' comes from a Latin word meaning 'earliest stage; beginning'.
