VOL. XLV.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 607 



it was a justice moreover he owed both to Mr. de BufFon and himself; for some 

 were made by M. de B. alone, some by him, and some of them in concert to- 

 gether: his system, the detail of his system, his experiments, his own discove- 

 ries, his thoughts in consequence of these discoveries; all these were reciprocally 

 communicated ; they made a secret of nothing to each other. Thus where one truth 

 seems to lead to, or is the natural consequence of another, it will be easy, from 

 the order he had observed, to see how much he had been obliged to his pene- 

 tration and foresight. But this would be more distinctly seen, when their se- 

 veral essays on this subject shall appear; and in the 2nd volume of M. de B.'s 

 Natural History, which would very soon be published, he would declare for a 

 fact, that all which precedes his accounts of the experiments, begun March l6, 

 N.s. of the year 1748, was previous either to his own experiments or Mr. N.'s, 

 and was read to Mr. de B. by himself. 



In this order of time therefore, Mr. de BufFon not only repeated the experi- 

 ment he had taken notice of, and added particular observations of his own, but 

 made some entirely new in every respect, peculiar to himself. Among these, 

 that never to be forgotten by naturalists, which at once destroys the opinion of 

 eggs in viviparous animals, and shows the real use of those reddish glandulous 

 bodies observed by Vallisnieri on the testicles or ovaries, as hitherto called of 

 cows. Every anatomist knows, that the whitish specks, near each of which a 

 hydatid is placed on all female ovaries, were hitherto either considered as con- 

 taining the real female eggs, or to be the remaining scars of eggs fecundated and 

 dislodged. Vallisnieri, nearer the truth, thought the large reddish glandulous 

 bodies, which he calls cherries, and found on the ovaries of cows and other fe- 

 males, in the time of their heat, if the animal is confined to any particular sea- 

 son, or at any time, in those females which are unconfined in this particular, 

 were the real productive organs contributory alone to generation; yet still with a 

 view to the ancient opinion of eggs, for he supposed these glandulous excres- 

 cences to be real oviparous productions. Mr. de BufFon, on the contrary, 

 long before observation had realized his conjectures, rightly thought these to be no 

 more than temporary blossoms, so to term them, not containing in their cavity, 

 which they have distinct when they are ripe, an egg, but the real female seed ; 

 that the whitish specks, scattered on the surface of female ovaries, were partly the 

 remaining scars of some of these temporary blossoms now faded, as having per- 

 formed their destined office, or embryo blossoms not yet expanded; that the 

 hydatid annexed to each of these, contained a quantity of imperfect indigested 

 seed; and that, if we took the blossom in time, when it should be entirely ripe 

 for action, as when a female is in heat, or not barren, these red glandulous ex- 

 crescences would furnish a fluid as really productive of true spermatic animals, 

 or organical parts, as he calls them, as that of any male observed by Hartsoeker, 



