56 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [anNO 1684. 



friable* bodies, joined together by lateral branches (after the manner of a net) and 

 resembling the omentum of fishes. These bodies are furnished with blood 

 vessels, which communicate with the chorion and placenta. Whether these 

 bodies, thus formed into a net- work, are muscular fibres, or nerves, or rather ex- 

 cretory vessels of the womb, the author does not pretend to determine.-^- — 

 Next follow some remarks on the placenta, which the author considers as a con- 

 texture of the umbilical vessels held together or imbedded in a peculiar sub- 

 stance. These remarks are followed by others on the ovaria, and on the man- 

 ner in which the germ or ovum gets from them (the ovaria) into the [Fallopian] 

 tube. In cows he more than once met with a vesicular body, larger than a 

 hen's egg, and filled with coagulable albumen, hanging from the ovarium. 

 These vesiculae are covered with a pretty strong membrane, on the inner sur- 

 face of which numerous blood vessels are seen. In process of time a solid 

 yellow body is produced, which appears as an excrescence from the ovarium, and 

 when arrived at its full growth is as large as a cherry. It has an investing mem- 

 brane, and is furnished with blood-vessels and nerves. This corpus luteum is 

 not always of the same size, shape and appearance — Sometimes these corpora 

 lutea are found effete, pervious by a sinuous duct, capable of admitting a probe. 

 The cavity within its investing membrane is such as would contain a pea. From 

 these facts it would appear (the author thinks) that the corpus luteum is de- 

 signed by nature not merely as a nidus or lodging place for the ovulum, until 

 the time of its ejection ; but that it perhaps contributes also to its production, 

 and may therefore be regarded in the light of a gland. — Hence it may be con- 

 jectured that the vesiculae (the appearances and contents of which have been 

 already described) which are at all times found in the ovaria, are not really the 

 ovula themselves, to be afterwards fecundated, but the substance or matter 

 from which the yellow and glandular body is formed. For it does not appear 

 certain that the yellow and glandular body is only to be seen post coitum, 

 seminisque masculini aflilisionem; for in calves, soon after birth, the author 

 asserts that he has detected a vesicle or two accompanied with a corpus luteum. + 

 In cows too, especially at the time of impregnation, and at different periods of 

 gestation, he found many of these corpora lutea in the ovaria, sometimes of the 



* Friabilibus componitur corporibus, &c. are the author's words ; but there is certainly an impro- 

 priety in calling soft mucous pelliculae friable. Loosely coherent would seem to be a more apposite 

 expression. 



i As in the immediately preceding part of these observations, the author has described the uterine 

 fungi of quadrupeds ; so here he has given an imperfect sketch of that uterine membrane, the de- 

 cidua, which has since been so accurately figured and described in the works of the late Dr. Wm. 

 Hunter. See his superb plates of the gravid uterus and the anatomical description of this viscus, 

 published from his manuscripts, by Dr. Baillie. 



I See also Blumenbach's observations on this subject, iu the 9th vol. of the Comment. Keg. 

 Soc. Gottingens. pp. 109—113. 



