470 ON GENERATION. 



left open for the escape of flatus, menstrual blood, and other 

 excreted fluids; but even the smallest and most subtile things, 

 air, for instance, and the seminal fluid are precluded all access 

 from without. 



In all animals this uterine orifice is found obstructed or 

 plugged up in the same way as it is wont to be in women, 

 among whom we have sometimes known the outlet so much con- 

 stricted that the menses, lochia, and other humours were retained 

 in the womb, and became the exciting cause of most severe 

 hysterical symptoms. In such cases it became necessary to 

 contrive a suitable instrument with which the os uteri being 

 opened, the matters that stagnated within were discharged, 

 when all the accidents disappeared. By this contrivance in- 

 jections could also be thrown into the cavity of the uterus, and 

 by means of these I have cured internal ulcers of the womb, 

 and have occasionally even found a remedy for barrenness. 



The cavity of the uterus in the deer is extremely small, and 

 the thickness of its walls not great ; the body of the womb in 

 these animals is, in fact, but a kind of vestibule, or ante-room, 

 in the cavity of which a passage opens to the right and left 

 into either cornu. 



For the parts are different in almost all animals from what they 

 are in woman, in whom the principal part of the uterus is its body, 

 and the cervix and cornua are mere appendices, that scarcely 

 attract attention. The neck is short; the cornua are slender 

 round processes extending from the fundus uteri like a couple of 

 tubes, which anatomists indeed commonly speak of as the vasa 

 ejaculatoria. In the deer, however, as in all other quadrupeds, 

 except the ape and the solipeds, the chief organ of generation 

 is not the body but the horns of the uterus. In the human 

 female and the solipedia, the uterus is the { place ' of conception, 

 in all the rest the conception is perfected in the cornua ; and 

 this is the reason why writers so commonly speak of the cornua 

 uteri in the lower animals under the simple name of the uterus, 

 saying that the uterus in certain animals is bipartite, whilst in 

 others it is not, understanding by the word uterus the place in 

 which conception takes place, this in the majority of vivipa- 

 rous and especially of multiparous animals being the cornua, to 

 which moreover all the arteries and veins distributed to the 

 organs of generation are sent. We shall therefore, in treating 



