preformationist

The term was also used by Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the 17th-century preformationist and discoverer of microorganisms, to describe spermatozoa.

In embryology, he was a preformationist, but also proposed that organisms are the outcome of a combination of an infinite number of possible microstructures and of their powers.

Henceforth, Joseph de Aromatari and then Marcello Malpighi and Jan Swammerdam made observations using microscopes in the late 17th century, and interpreted their findings to develop the preformationist theory.

Aristotle purported to analyse ontogeny in terms of the material, formal, efficient, and teleological causes (as they are usually named by later anglophone philosophy) - a view that, though more complex than some subsequent ones, is essentially more epigenetic than preformationist.