100 OF REPRODUCTION. 



254. Seat. But the point in the organs at which the two germs 

 meet is not yet completely ascertained. Is it in the ovary ? Is it 

 in the oviduct 1 Is it in the womb ? All the ancients agreed that 

 the vivification of the germs takes place in the womb, whether, like 

 Pythagoras, they call to their aid an extremely subtle nervous prin- 

 ciple, whether they invoke, like Harvey, a magnetic impregnation, 

 or whether they content themselves with the seminal liquor of the 

 male, to explain the fact: almost all the ovarists, on the contrary, 

 have thought it could only be effected in the ovary, and a great ma- 

 jority of the physiologists of the present day are of this way of 

 thinking. 



255. Among the animalculists, one party believed that fecundation 

 takes place in the womb without any participation by the ovule, or 

 with Maupertuis, that the animalcules attracted the ovarian vesicles 

 to the womb in order to effect their agglomeration or germification. 

 Others, with Andry, supposed that a single animalcule reaches the 

 ovary, enters an ovule by lifting a small valve, and thai fecundation 

 is effected at that moment. P'inally, MM. Prevost and Dumas, re- 

 turning in this respect to the idea of Buffon, of Maupertuis, of Aris- 

 totle and Hippocrates, admit that the uterine cavity is the seat of 

 fecundation. 



256. To maintain this last hypothesis, they rely on the circum- 

 stance that they were never, in their experiments, able to find any 

 animalcules in the Fallopian tubes, and, a fortiori, in the ovaries; 

 while they frequently met with them in the womb or its horns; on 

 the fact, that before the ovules can become impregnated, they must 

 be enveloped in a coat of mucus, which they receive while in the 

 tube on their way to the womb; that they could never succeed in the 

 artificial fecundation of ovules taken directly from the ovary, while 

 nothing was easier than to vivify such as had traversed the tube and 

 the oviduct, &c. But Ruysch saw the prolific matter in the Fallo- 

 pian tubes of a woman who was taken in adultery and killed on the 

 spot by her husband; Haller found semen in the seminiferous ducts 

 of the female animals on which he experimented. Besides, are we 

 authorised to deny the existence of a fact observed by others, because 

 we have ourselves sought for it in vain? Have we a right to infer, 

 because the eggs of frogs cannot be fecundated unless they have been 

 previously more or less thickly covered with a coating of mucus, 

 that the same thing holds true in women? Further, these ovules 

 which MM. Prevost and Dumas found unfit for fecundation, could 

 not have been forcibly detached from the ovary without having been 

 somewhat altered by the instrument; and that too, by the admission 

 of the experimenters themselves. Though the existence of ovarian 

 pregnancies is far from being demonstrated; though the fact of an 



