COPULATORY ORGANS OF THE AMNIOTA. 
23 
bladders been distended with water, whereas they often yielded the grumous substance 
mentioned above. 
To ascertain this, I put a muzzled Emys eur opera into a large pan of water coloured 
with indigo-carmine in suspended form. When taken out the following day, coloured 
water mixed with small blue clots was freely squirted out, followed by clear urine 
after pressure upon the xiphiplastron. This was repeated on several days. After 
four days I took the Tortoise out and at once clamped the anal opening. P. M. dissec¬ 
tion showed that no coloured fluid had entered the intestines through the mouth. 
No blue stuff had entered the urinary bladder, which was half full, nor had it passed 
into the rectum or into the oviducts. The vestibulum cloacae and the pouches con¬ 
tained a little coloured fluid, and each pouch was to the greater part filled with a 
large piece of clotted indigo-carmine. This could not have been collected there 
unless the Tortoise had frequently taken in water. 
Peritoneal canals exist in all Chelonia. Their abdominal openings are situated in a 
recess of the peritoneum close to the sides of the neck of the bladder. Anderson 
has done much to clear up the great diversities contained in the descriptions of these 
organs by various anatomists ; discrepancies which are less due to faulty observation 
than to too hasty generalisations. Cuvier described the peritoneal canals as termi¬ 
nating blindly near the glans penis in the male. Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire and 
Martin believed that, as Anderson puts it, the canals divide at their extremity 
into two branches, one going into the cloaca, and the other tending towards the 
corpus cavernosum, in this way, that it opened into the cavity of the corpus 
cavernosum in Tortoises, whilst it terminated in a cul-de-sac in the Crocodiles. 
Owen adheres more or less to this view. P^athke does not mention these canals. 
Stannius says that in theChelonians these peritoneal canals “are apparently, without 
exception, closed at their ends.” 
Anderson, after most carefully conducted experiments, expresses himself cautiously: 
“ I am not prepared to go the length of saying that there is invariably a communication 
between the peritoneal canals and the cloaca in the males ; but at the same time there 
can be no doubt that in the males of Gecemyda grandis, Emys Hamiltoni, and Trionyx 
ocellatus such a communication does exist. In this respect these animals conform to 
the course of these canals in the Crocodile. . . . All I insist on is that in the males, 
as in the females, experimented upon, these canals do open into the cloaca, and in this 
respect conform to the general type of structure distinctive of the peritoneal canals 
of Crocodilia, and of the so-called abdominal pores of the Cyclostomata and Ganoid 
Fishes.” 
Hoffmann, in Bronn’s ‘ Thierreich,’ the latest writer on Chelonia, leaves the whole 
question open, but adds that he found, like Cuvier, Stannius, Owen, Mayer, and 
Lataste, that the canals of Emys, Testudo, Chelys, Chelodina, terminate blindly, and 
open neither into the cloaca nor through the glans penis. 
My own investigations show the following results :—In a large male Testudo 
