6l6 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1683. 



The sagacious Dr. Harvey was very near the discovery of the egg, and its 

 use : he came within sight of it, but overlooked it. After many repeated 

 dissections of impregnated deer, he asserts, that nothing for about 6 or 7 weeks 

 can be seen in the cornua of their wombs : that there then appeared somewhat 

 like an egg, a transparent liquor included in a very thin membrane, in which 

 after a week he could plainly see the rudiments of a foetus. He gives his opinion 

 very expressly in his treatise de Partu ; " vipera ovum unicolor et molli cortice 

 (qualis muliebris conceptus est) intra se continet, &c." The viper has eggs, 

 whose parts are of one colour, enclosed in a soft shell ; and the very same is a 

 woman's conception. But he could not inform himself, how the eggs in wo- 

 men or in deer come into the womb. He declares himself fully satisfied after 

 several trials, that no liquor can be so forcibly injected into the womb,soas to make 

 its passage into the place of conception. Nor did he suspect, that the seed of the 

 female lay till the egg appeared, in any crannies or recesses of the cornua uteri, 

 which he asserts are then as smooth and soft as the corpus callosum of the brain. 

 Dr: Harvey having thus sufficiently confuted the opinion, which till his time 

 prevailed, of the production of animals from the mixture of the seminal matter 

 of both sexes, it was not so difficult to discover whence the egg came, which he 

 saw about 7 weeks after impregnation. The Fallopian tubes which join to the 

 cornua and terminate very near the ovaria, as the testes muliebres are generally 

 now called, directed the ingenious and industrious de GraafFto make more accu- 

 rate dissections of them. He presently saw that the limpid liquor which Dr. 

 Harvey thought was designed to humect the parts adjacent, was contained in an 

 entire membrane, and exactly answered the description he gives of the eggs he 

 saw in the womb. 



As he first discovered the use of those globules in the ovaria, so in that ex- 

 cellent piece de Mulieris Organis, he demonstrates the alteration of those 

 which are impregnated, the way of excluding them by the glandulous substance 

 swelling behind them, and the aperture through which they pass, remaining 

 open all the time of gestation, &c. But more particularly he has very nicely 

 observed the progress of the eggs in conies, the very time of their passing into 

 the tubes, and appearing in the cornua of the womb, which comes very near that 

 portion of time Dr. Harvey observed the eggs in his deer; so that nothing can 

 be objected of force enough to shake an opinion confirmed by such numerous 

 exact observations. He has prevented the objection which Diemerbroeck and 

 Mr. Verney use against him, that the tube is too narrow at each end to trans- 

 mit globules of that size: alleging that the hole by which it has its exit out 

 of the ovarium is as narrow ; that no force is used to open it, but it expands 

 itself, as the os uteri before the birth : as nuts and peach-stones, &c. give way 



