226 THE FCETUS. 



581. Some, however, have persisted in maintaining that tlie Inng 

 exerts a certain action on the water of the amnios; that it separates 

 air or some other principle from it; in a word, that it exercises a 

 sort of respiration: on this subject reliance has been placed on 

 some researches made in Denmark by Scheele, Wiborg, Winslow, 

 Heroldt, &c. ; experiments that tend to prove that the liquor amnii 

 fills the trachea and bronchia of the foetus; on those of Beclard, 

 who saw the same thing; and further, that the young of a bitch, still 

 enclosed in the membranes, executed the motions of dilating and 

 contracting the alae nasi, and of the chest; lastly, on the fact that 

 the foetus has on more than one occasion been heard to cry while in 

 the mother's womb. 



582. But it has been seen, farther back, what ought to be thought 

 of the presence of liquor amnii in the gastric or pulmonary passages 

 of the dead foetuses. De Buffon and Autenreith, who got the foetuses 

 of animals to live in that fluid; Wrisberg and Osiander, who have 

 both seen the human foetus live ten and fifteen minutes out of the 

 womb with the membranes unruptured, did not see the respiratory 

 movement mentioned by Beclard; I too had an opportunity, in 1825, 

 of witnessing a fact that was very curious, and well adapted to 

 illustrate this point; a woman at the Hospital de Perfectionnement, 

 and who said she was six complete months pregnant, was suddenly 

 delivered at five o'clock in the morning of the 23d of August; the 

 ovum, which came away whole, was received by M. Lafond a resident 

 student at the hospital. The specimen was immediately brought to 

 me, and I placed it in a large bowl of tepid water. The foetus did 

 not appear to be of more than five months and a half; I left the 

 membranes whole; I carefully examined the nose, the mouth, the 

 abdomen and thorax of the foetus, which continued to live in this way 

 for thirty six minutes, but I discovered no motion in the thorax, 

 except the slight throbbing occasioned by the action of the heart. 

 "We were also able to convince ourselves that the water of the amnios 

 had penetrated neither into the trachea nor the stomach. 



583. Uterine vagitus. As to the cries generally known under 

 the title of vagitus uterinus, examples of it may be found in Albert 

 Legrand, Libavius, Solinus, Camerarius, Sennertus, Bartholin, Deu- 

 singius, "Vellhusius, Boyle, and Needham himself; but these ac- 

 counts being given only upon the hearsay of old women, do not de- 

 serve the trouble of being repeated. The subject has come up 

 again in our own day: Osiander affirms that he heard these cries 

 in two different women; M. Zitterland cites an instance of it which 

 he himself witnessed, after having taken all proper precautions to 

 avoid being deceived; MM. Henri and Jobert have observed the 



