&b Mr. W. Heape. The artificial Insemination of Mammals 



Such defects as these may effectually prevent conception by 

 natural means, since spermatozoa placed in the vagina may thus be 

 prevented from ascending to the uterus and fallopian tubes and 

 from meeting there a newly discharged ovum, but they may be over- 

 come by placing the spermatozoa directly into the uterine cavity. 



The great difficulty of ensuring success with women would seem 

 to be due to our ignorance of the time of ovulation. I will not refer 

 to this matter further here, having considered it somewhat fully else- 

 where (No. 13). 



The performance of the operation on women presents no great 

 difficulties and writers on the subject are agreed on this point. 

 Spermatozoa is collected, either direct from the male, or from the 

 vagina of the female immediately after coition, and is injected into 

 the cavity of the uterus by means of a syringe, to which is attached 

 a fine tube which the operator passes through the canal of the cervix. 



Tarnier (No. 37) credits Girault with having operated on forty 

 women who were positively declared to be sterile, of which number 

 eighteen bore children in consequence, and his seems to have been 

 the most successful record. I have given at the end of this paper a 

 list of the authors who deal with the subject, and it will not be 

 necessary to go more fully into this branch of it here, since the 

 writers record nothing which is of further general interest. 



In recent years both bitches and mares have been successfally 

 inseminated by artificial means. 



Sir Everett Millais, who is a noted breeder of Basset hounds, has 

 made a very remarkable series of experiments of this kind on bitches 

 in his own kennels, and he has most kindly supplied me with an 

 account of them and placed the details at my disposal for publica- 

 tion. His method is to collect spermatozoa from the dog and inject 

 it by means of a syringe into the generative canal of the bitch; it 

 seems probable that the syringe does not reach beyond the vagina 

 and that the spermatozoa is thus deposited at the further end of that 

 organ, from whence it finds its way into the uterus by the same 

 means employed after natural insemination. These experiments 

 were not undertaken in order to overcome barrenness; hence it 

 was quite sufficient for his purpose to inject the spermatozoa into the 

 vagina. 



Experiment L— In 1884 Sir Everett Millais published (No. 19) an 

 account of the first experiment he made. He inseminated artifici- 

 ally a Basset hound bitch with spermatozoa obtained from a dog of 

 the same breed, with the result that the bitch gave birth to pups, 

 which were, however, born dead. 



Experiment 2. — In 1885 he artificially inseminated three Basset 

 hound bitches, the semen being obtained from a single emission of a 

 dog of the same breed, and each bitch receiving one-third part of it. 



