SECT. 3] THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 219 



that this could be at most the very slightest source of material, from 

 a study of acephalic monsters. These workers had obviously learnt 

 nothing from Herissant and Brady, who had been over precisely the 

 same ground fifty years before. On the other hand. Goods and 

 Osiander reported the birth of embryos without umbilical cords, so 

 that the solution of this question became, in the first year of the 

 nineteenth century, balanced, as it were, between the relative 

 credibility of two kinds of prodigy. Nourishment per os was defended 

 by Kessel, Hannes and Grambs, and was attacked by Vogel, Bern- 

 hard, Glaser, Hannhard and Reichard. The idea lingered on right 

 into the modern period, and as late as 1 886 von Ott, who was much 

 puzzled about placental permeability, decided that a great part in 

 foetal nutrition must be played by the amniotic liquid. WeidHch, 

 a student of his, fed a calf on amniotic liquid for some days, and as 

 it seemed to get on all right, he reported the amniotic liquid to have 

 nutritive properties. The appeal to monsters was still resorted to at 

 the end of the nineteenth century, for Opitz, in order to negative von 

 Ott's conclusions, drew attention to a specimen in the Chemnitz 

 Polyklinik in which the oesophagus of a well-nourished normal infant 

 was closed at the upper third without the development of the body 

 having been in any way restricted. The fuller possibilities of bio- 

 chemistry itself have sometimes been exploited in favour of the ancient 

 theory of nourishment />^r os\ thus Kottnitz in 1889 collected some 

 data about the presence of peptones and protein in the human 

 amniotic liquid with this object in view. That the foetus swallows 

 the liquid which surrounds it towards the end of gestation in all 

 amniota, can hardly be disputed, and as there are known to be 

 active proteolytic enzymes in the intestinal tract, no doubt some of 

 the protein which it contains is digested — but to maintain that any 

 significant part is played in foetal nutrition by this process has 

 become steadily more and more impossible since 1600. 



But to return to the eighteenth century; all was not repetition; 

 occasionally somebody brought forward a few facts. Thus the de- 

 glutition of the amniotic Hquid was discussed by Flemyng in 1 755 

 in a paper under the title " Some observations proving that the foetus 

 is in part nourished by the amniotic liquor". "I believe", he said, 

 "that very few, if any at all, will maintain now-a-days with Claudius 

 de la Courvee and Stalpartvan-der-Wiel, that the whole of its nourish- 

 ment is conveyed by the mouth." But he himself had found white 



