VOL. XIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 60f 



friends, the eclipses of the next year shall be imparted early enough to be pub- 

 lished in the December Transactions. I am, &c.* 

 Observatory, Sept. 22, l683. 



j4n Account of the cutting out the Ccecum of a Bitch. By William Musgrave^-^- 

 LL. B. Student in Physic, and Felloiv of New-College ^ Oxon. N° 151, 

 p. 324. 



The use of the caecum being still a desideratum in anatomy, I thought it 

 worth while to try, what light the cutting out of that part might afford us, in a 

 matter so obscure. In my first experiment of this kind (l683) my hopes were 

 soon defeated, by the death of the dog, two days after the operation ; but I was 

 more successful in a second attempt. April l683, I took a bitch of about a 

 year old, and opened the abdomen on the right side, in the regio iliaca, passing 

 my knife through the musculus obliquus ascendens, and by the side of the mus- 

 culus rectus; having found the caecum, I immediately put up the other guts 

 again into the abdomen, after which I separated the caecum from the ileum, 

 cutting the membrane which binds part of the former to the latter; then having 

 made a ligature on the artery which comes to the caecum, I made three or four 

 prick-seams through the sides of the caecum, at the farther end of it, where it is 

 continued to the rectum, and by thus sewing the sides together stopped the passage 

 of the faeces that way; after this I cut off the caecum about ^ of an inch from the 

 stitches, and sewed together the new-made lips, entering my needle always on 

 the inside and passing it through the outer membrane, that so the lips might the 

 better touch edgewise, and grow together. The wounds being sewed up, and 

 the bitch tied away, milk was set before her, of which she lapped a small quantity 

 the next morning, and by degrees recovered, so that in 3 weeks she seemed as 

 well as ever ; in a little time she grew fat and proud, and the last summer 

 brought a litter of whelps : in 4 months observation I could not perceive any 

 such alteration in her, as might reasonably be imputed to the loss of the caecum. 



Sept. 19, 1633, I caused her to be hanged, and opened her a second time in 

 presence of Dr. Pitt, our professor of anatomy. We found a great part of the 



* The calculations are omitted, as quite useless now. 



+ "William Musgrave, a learned physician and antiquary, was a native of Charlton, in Somerset- 

 shire, and was educated at Oxford. He was one of the secretaries of the Royal Society, and supe». 

 intended the publication of the Philosophical Transactions, from N° 167 to N° 178 inclusive. He 

 afterwards removed to Exeter, where he continued to practise as a physician until the time of his 

 death, which happened in 1721, when he was about 64 years of age. He wrote two medical tracts 

 de Arthritide, and several other learned works, chiefly on antiquities 3 besides various papers inserted 

 in the Philosophical Transactions. 



