222 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1751. 



texture seemed to evince the latter. But first, on pressing this bag, all its con- 

 tents returned into the abdomen ; 2dly, the patient assured him, even at the in- 

 stant, that his rupture had kept up since its reduction in 1748 ; and he found 

 this bag adhering, not only to the first bag, but also attached by old and strong 

 adherences to the testicle and spermatic vessels ; and it was impossible that this 

 state should be the effect of 3 days of strangulation. However, as the patient 

 might possibly have deceived him in his account ; and it was dangerous to open 

 a bag which had too near a resemblance with the gut of an incomplete hernia, 

 he came to a resolution, which equally suited the 2 suspected cases. He sepa- 

 rated the testicle and spermatic vessels from this sack, and pushed back this 

 pocket, or second bag, into the belly. 



The patient having died on the Qth day after the operation, they found that 

 the pocket which had given them so much uneasiness, and which he had re- 

 duced into the belly, was really a herniary sack formed by the true peritonaeum ; 

 and therefore that the first sack must have been either an interior aponeurotic 

 lamina of the abdominal muscles, or the cellular membrane thickened by the 

 long duration of the hernia and its strangulations. The considerable thickness 

 of the true or second sack renders this notion very probable. He says that the 

 first sack must have been formed by an interior aponeurotic lamina, and not 

 from an exterior one, like that of the first observation ; because, in this opera- 

 tion, he had freed the ring, in his usual manner, above this first sack, and with- 

 out opening it. Then he passed the grooved catheter over this sack, under the 

 aponeurosis or pillar of the musculus obliquus externus : and therefore this sack 

 could not be a continuation of this external aponeurosis, but that of some more 

 inner lamina, or of the cellular membrane of the very peritonaeum, separated 

 from the true lamina by the serosities which they found in it. 



Two other observations are subjoined : 



1*/. A Natural Blind Duct, being a Production of the True Lamina of the 

 Peritona-um by the Rings. — In the dead body of a woman, 46 years old, he 

 found this duct of the thickness of a goose-quill, being a production of the true 

 lamina of the peritonaeum stretched out by the rings ; of which Swammerdam 

 and Nuck dispute the discovery, and Blancard denies the existence. What made 

 him discover this, was, that its extremity was widened into the shape of a bubble 

 as large as the top of a finger, and full of a watery humour. This woman had 

 never had a hernia, nor even the least tendency towards one. 



2d. Strictures and Carnosities in the Urethra. — Nothing is more common at 

 this day than to hear people assert, that strictures and carnosities of the urethra 

 are mere chimeras ; that the bodies of persons, who were thought to have these 

 strictures and carnosities, had been opened, and that none of these had been 

 found. He himself has made this observation, and he inferred thence, that 

 there were urethras, in which a phlogosis, a fungous inflation gave occasion to 



