480 ON GENERATION. 



only in exceedingly rare instances that I met with such matter, 

 and as twenty days had then passed since the doe had had any 

 intercourse with the buck, and farther, as the matter was not 

 viscid and tenacious, or spumous, such as the seminal fluid 

 presents itself to us, but rather friable, purulent looking, 

 and inclining to yellow, I came to the conclusion that it was 

 the effect of accident, a sweat or exudation in consequence of 

 violent exercise previous to death ; just as in a catarrh the 

 thinner defluxion of the nose is by and by changed into a 

 thicker mucus. 



Having frequently shown this alteration in the uterus to his 

 majesty the king as the first indication of pregnancy, and satis- 

 fied him at the same time that there was nothing in the shape 

 of semen or conception to be found in the cavity of the organ, 

 and he had spoken of this as an extraordinary fact to several 

 about him, a discussion at length arose : the keepers and hunts- 

 men asserted at first that it was but an argument of a tardy 

 conception occasioned by the want of rain. But by and by, 

 when they saw the rutting season pass away, I still con- 

 tinuing to maintain that things were in the same state, they 

 began to say that I was both deceived myself and had misled 

 the king, and that there must of necessity be something of the 

 conception to be found in the uterus. These men, however, 

 when I got them to bring their own eyes to the inquiry, soon 

 gave up the point. The physicians, nevertheless, held it among 

 their aSvvara their impossibilities that any conception should 

 ever be formed without the presence of the semen masculinum, 

 or some trace remaining of a fertile intercourse within the cavity 

 of the womb. 



That this important question might be the more satisfac- 

 torily settled in all time to come, his highness the king ordered 

 about a dozen does to be separated from the bucks towards the 

 beginning of October, and secluded in the inclosure, which is 

 called the course, at Hampton Court, because the animal placed 

 there has no means of escape from the dogs let loose upon 

 it. Now that no one might say the animals thus secluded 

 retained any of the semen received from the last connexions 

 with the male, I dissected several of them before the rutting 

 season had passed, and ascertained that no seminal fluid re- 

 mained in the uterus, although the others were found to be 



