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Art. XIII. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. 



The usual meetings of the Society were resumed after the long 

 vacation, on Thursday, the \^th of November, at which meeting 

 Captain Douglas Charles Clavering was admitted, and Richard 

 Penn, Esq. was elected a Fellow of the Society. 



Dr. Babington, Sir T. S. RafHes, and Messrs. Baily, Mac Leay, 

 and Herschel, were elected Auditors on the part of the Society. 



Thursday, Nov. 25. — ^The Cronian Lecture was read by Sir 

 Everard Home, Bart., in which he announced his discovery of nerves 

 in the foetal and maternal placenta. 



His previous researches had led him to doubt the existence of 

 blood-vessels without nerves, and the extreme vascularity of the 

 placenta led him to suspect them in that organ. With the assist- 

 ance of Mr. Bauer, therefore, he first examined the placenta of the 

 seal, the arteries and veins of which had been injected, and in 

 wliich nerves were discerned, not only surrounding the umbilical 

 arteries, but also in the uterine portion. 



In the pregnant uterus of the Tapir of Sumatra, in which, there 

 being no placenta, the umbilical chord is connected with the 

 Chorion, nerves were very conspicuous in the transparent portion 

 of the Chorion along which the branches of the funis pass before 

 they arrive at the spongy part. 



Having thus proved the existence of nerves in the placenta, and 

 where that is wanting, in the flocculent Chorion, Sir E. proceeded 

 to offer some general remarks upon their probable uses and in- 

 fluences. 



From the various sources, the number and the ganglia of the 

 uterine nerves, and from the circumstance of their becoming en- 

 larged during pregnancy, he inferred their powerful influences on 

 the F(£tus in Ufero ; and, for the further illustration of this subject, 

 added a description of the nerves connected with the generative 

 organs in the human species, the quadruped, the bird, and the 

 frog. 



