200 NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY OF DUBLIN. 
one of them having been made, the interior of the gland was found to 
be composed of a pulpy cream-coloured substance, almost diffluent, 
showing but faint traces of dividing septa or of blood vessels; the vasa 
deferentia were transversely corrugated in the tube of peritoneum 
which conducted them to the cloaca; there were no traces of epididymis. 
There were no appearances of inflammation or adhesion in the neigh- 
bourhood of the glands to indicate that their enlargement was the 
result of disease. 
While dissecting the drake, I found on one of my fingers the 
anterior portion of some species of bothriocephalus; the portion was 
between two and three inches long; all the segments were very narrow; 
the bothria appeared at one extremity as four black dots, like the eyes 
of a small snail’s horns. I cut up the entire of the intestinal canal in 
hopes of finding the lower part of the worm, but the search was in 
vain. 
It occurred to me that it might be interesting and useful to report 
these pathological appearances to the Natural History Society, as it is 
by such a Society that the morbid appearances observed in wild and 
domesticated animals can be most correctly interpreted, since this 
Society, including among its members so many naturalists, physicians, 
and anatomists, can bring to bear on such subjects an amount of special 
knowledge not at the disposal of other societies, and because it ap- 
pears to me that every opportunity of recording the causes of animal 
mortality, as revealed by post-mortem examination, should be taken ad- 
vantage of, at all events until our knowledge of comparative pathology 
becomes very much more extensive than itis at present. 
It may, I presume, be taken for granted that the immediate cause 
of death in this drake was the inflammation of the membrane investing 
the heart—an affection which must be proportionately more serious in 
animals with such rapid circulation as birds, from the much more fre- 
quent action of their heart. Pericarditis is an affection which does 
not appear to be very common among birds; the breast bone and the 
great mass of pre-sternal muscles make a very efficient protection _ 
against external causes of this disease. However, examples of death 
from pericarditis have been reported in the eagle, emeu, black swan, 
and Muscovy duck—birds of very diverse structure and habits. The 
inflammation may extend to the air cells of the side of the chest, less 
usually to the lungs, which, confined in birds to the dorsal part of the 
chest, are withdrawn from the pericardium, leaving the whole of its 
anterior surface exposed when the sternum is removed. 
A plugged condition of the veins, especially of the larger ones, such 
as existed in this drake, may be very frequently noticed in birds, and 
that in birds dissected very soon after death ; thus, in an exceedingly 
fat stork, examined while its interior was quite warm, I found the 
blood in all the large veins, and also in some of the arteries, coagulated 
into black cylindrical moulds of the vessels, the four cavities of the 
heart containing dark clotted blood. The blood of birds is wont to 
coagulate very rapidly after death, and also very firmly, probably from 
