Page 684. 
456 ON THE PLACENTA 
days, in order to render the membrane as translucent as possible. 
When the mucosa thus prepared was examined microscopically, the 
openings of the uterine glands on the surface of the membrane could 
be seen. Sometimes these openings were found on the slender raised 
folds of mucosa separating adjacent crypts from each other; at other 
times they opened into the crypts, and at other times on smoother 
portions of the membrane where the crypts were shallower or almost 
absent; but in no case were the mouths of the glands specially 
localised in smooth circumscribed areas of the mucosa, as is the case 
in the Pig and in the Lemurs. The gland-orifices were directed 
obliquely to the plane of the free surface of the membrane; and it 
was not uncommon to see an epithelial plug projecting through the 
mouth. 
Additional views of the relation of the glands to the crypts were 
obtained by making vertical sections through the mucosa. This mem- 
brane consisted of a gland layer and a crypt layer. The gland layer 
was next the muscular coat, and consisted of elongated tubular glands, 
somewhat tortuons and occasionally bifurcating. In the vertical sec-: 
tions the glands were cut across so that the tubes were sometimes 
transversely, at others obliquely, at others longitndinally divided, and 
here and there the stem of a gland could be seen passing obliquely 
through the crypt-layer to open on the surface in the manner already 
described. The glands were lined by a columnar epithelium, and 
possessed a central lumen. The glands were neither so numerous nor 
so distinct, neither did they bifurcate so frequently as do the utricular 
glands in the Pig and the Cetacea. 
The crypt layer contained the numerous depressions already re- 
ferred to for the lodgment of the villi of the chorion. The epithe- 
lium lining the crypts had, as a rule, disappeared; so that it was only 
in exceptional localities that it could be seen in situ, where it appeared 
to consist of cells, the type form of which was columnar, though 
modifications of that shape occurred. The subepithelial connective 
tissue contained a large proportion of corpuscles, some of which were 
fusiform, others polygonal, others of the rounded form of white 
blood-corpuscles. This tissue was more compact where it formed the 
walls of the crypts; but deeper in the mucosa, as it approached the 
glandular layer and the muscular coat, it had an areolated character. 
The vessels of the uterus were not injected; but there can be no 
doubt that, if they had been so, the walls of the crypts would have 
been seen to contain an abundant freely anastomosing network of 
capillaries, such as exist in the corresponding crypts in the Cetacea, 
the Mare, the Pig, and the Lemurs. In sections through the wall of 
the uterus, that had been stained with hematoxylin, a well-defined 
band, coloured with the blue pigment, marked the junction of the 
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