I then believe that it has some foundation .-- They say with good reason," he adds, "that every living being originates from an egg....

But the eggs being the envelope of every kind of germ, they preexist in the individuals which produce them, before fertilization has vivified them.

The seeds of plants (which are vegetable eggs) actually exist in the ovaries of flowers before the fertilization of these ovaries."[112] From whom did he get this idea that seeds or eggs are envelopes of all sorts of germs?
It is not the "evolution" of a single germ, as, for example, an excessively minute but complete chick in the hen's egg, in the sense held by Bonnet.

Who it was he does not mention.

He evidently, however, had the Swiss biologist in mind, who held that all living things proceed from preexisting germs.[113] Whatever may have been his views as to the germs in the egg before fertilization, we take it that he believed in the epigenetic development of the plant or animal after the seed or egg was once fertilized.[114] Lamarck did not adopt the encasement theory of Swammerdam and of Heller.
We find nothing in Lamarck's writings opposed to epigenesis.