180 ON GENERATION. 



Would you have an example of these structures ? Figure to 

 yourself a small plant, whose tuberous roots should represent 

 the congeries of yelks ; its stalk the infundibulum. Now, as 

 the stalk of this plant dies in the winter and disappears, in like 

 manner, when the fowl ceases to lay eggs, the whole ovary, with 

 the infundibulum, withers, shrinks, and is annulled ; the basis 

 [stroma] and indication of the roots being still left. 



This infundibulum seems only to discharge the office of a 

 conduit, or tube of passage : the yelk is never observed sticking 

 in it ; but as the testes at times creep upwards through the tu- 

 nicse vaginales into the groins, and in some animals the hare 

 and the mole even become concealed within the abdomen, and 

 nevertheless again descend and show themselves externally, so 

 are the vitelli transmitted through the infundibulum from the 

 ovary into the uterus. Its office is served, and even its form is 

 imitated, by the funnel which we make use of when we pour 

 fluids from one vessel into another having a narrower mouth. 



EXERCISE THE FIFTH. 



Of the external portion of the uterus of the common fowl. 



Fabricius pursues his account of the uterus after having de- 

 scribed the ovary, and in such an inverse order, that he pre- 

 mises a description of the superior portion or appendage of the 

 uterus before he approaches the uterus itself. He assigns to it 

 three turns or spirals, with somewhat too much of precision or 

 determinateness, and settles the respective situations of these 

 spirals, which are nevertheless of uncertain seat. Here, too, 

 he very unnecessarily repeats his definition of the infundibulum. 

 I would, therefore, in this place, beg to be allowed to give my 

 own account of the uterus of the fowl, according to the ana- 

 tomical method, which I consider the more convenient, and pro- 

 ceeding from external to internal parts, in opposition to the 

 method of Fabricius. 



In the fowl stripped of its feathers, the fundament will be ob- 

 served not contracted circularly, as in other animals, but form- 

 ing a depressed orifice, slit transversely, and consisting of two lips 



