S80 Dr Knox on the Anatomy of the 
salivary glands just described are large, but not disproportion- 
ately so. 
The anatomy of the other organs treated of in this memoir, 
shewed generally a decided analogy with the mammalia, with 
the exception, perhaps, of the heart. In the structure of this 
organ, there is, undoubtedly, something of an ornithological 
character ; the valves placed at the entrance of the venae cavae into 
the right auricle, seemed in a great measure muscular ; and the 
right auriculo- ventricular valve was much more muscular than 
membranous. 
The Third Memoir describes the anatomy of the organs of ge- 
neration at considerable length ; because, next to the poison-gland 
and spur, it was relative to these organs that the greatest errors 
had been committed by the Continental anatomists. Our limits 
do not permit of our entering upon these details, and we shall, 
therefore, content ourselves with stating, that Dr Knox’s dissecr 
lions have demonstrated the presence of a seminal urethra, dis- 
tinct from that for the urine ; that the seminal fluid, after ha- 
ving been transmitted by the vasa deferentia into the urinary ca- 
nal or true urethra, passes from it by a small circular aperture into 
a cavity in which terminate the ducts from the glands of Cowper ; 
and that from this common cavity arises the true seminal canal, 
situated in the body of the penis, and terminating anteriorly by 
eight conical and pervious papillae. Most of those facts had been 
already pointed out by Sir Everard Home, in the Philosophical 
Transactions, but had been neglected by the Continental anato- 
mists, owing, perhaps, to certain discrepancies observable in his 
separate memoirs on the subject. We thus see, that a single 
accurate dissection destroys the whole of those speculations 
which had arisen out of the supposed peculiarities in the organs 
of generation ; peculiarities thought sufficient to warrant the ar- 
ranging the ornithorynchus with animals of an entirely opposite 
structure. 
The Fourth Memoir, which treats of the osseous, muscular 
and nervous systems, contains a lengthened inquiry into the cha- 
racter of the bones composing the shoulder and sternum, which 
the author in the present state of the science found it impossible 
to reduce to their analogies in the mammalia. It is here that 
the structure of the ornithorynchus is most anomalous, and that 
