of Edinburgh, Session 1885 - 86 . 675 
give as they were much broken up, and had shrunk away from the 
walls. 
There can, however, I should imagine, he no doubt whatever that 
the structures figured in figs. 3, 4, and 5 are ova, and that the body 
in whose cavities they were invariably found is the ovary. 
The oviduct (fig. 2, od) is greatly coiled, and when stretched out 
is of considerable length; the distal region, that nearest to the 
ovary, can readily be distinguished in transverse sections by its 
wider lumen and thinner walls ; this part is lettered d in fig. 3, 
the proximal section of the oviduct is lettered c in the same figure; 
b is the vagina. I have traced by means of sections the whole course 
of the oviduct from the aperture into the vagina up to its disappear- 
ance in the interior of the ovary, but I have not thought it worth 
while to figure a large series of sections in order to display the 
whole course of the oviduct. The oviduct is lined by a columnar 
epithelium , which , at any rate in certain regions , is ciliated. At the 
point where the oviduct opens into the vagina, but on the opposite 
side of the latter, is a small, spherical, yellowish-coloured, glandular 
body, which can readily be distinguished from the ovary by its 
yellowish colour (the ovary is white and translucent) and smaller 
size; an examination of its minute structure showed also that this 
body is not a second ovary, for it contained no traces of ova. The 
interior is divided up, however, like the ovary into numerous com- 
partments by trabeculae, and the walls of these compartments are 
everywhere lined by an epithelium. It appears to be a glandular 
organ, and it communicates (fig. 5) by a short, narrow duct with 
the vagina. This structure is possibly analogous to an albumini- 
parous gland. I could observe no traces of spermatozoa either in 
this glandular diverticulum or in the spermatheca, but it appears to 
be exceedingly probable, from the structure of these parts, that the 
ova are fertilised in the duct of the spermatheca which I have 
termed the vagina (fig. 2, v). 
At the commencement of this paper I have given M. Perrier credit 
for having been the first to recognise the fact that the ovary opens 
into the duct of the spermatheca, and that its contents reach the 
exterior by this duct. M. Perrier’s circumstantial account and the 
figure which he gives seems to favour such an interpretation; I find 
that Mr Benham, in a recently published memoir on earthworms, has 
