Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/280

 Would you have an example of these structures? Figure to yourself a small plant, whose tuberous roots should represent the congeries of yelks; its stalk the infundibulum. Now, as the stalk of this plant dies in the winter and disappears, in like manner, when the fowl ceases to lay eggs, the whole ovary, with the infundibulum, withers, shrinks, and is annulled; the basis [stroma] and indication of the roots being still left.

This infundibulum seems only to discharge the office of a conduit, or tube of passage: the yelk is never observed sticking in it; but as the testes at times creep upwards through the tunicæ vaginales into the groins, and in some animals—the hare and the mole—even become concealed within the abdomen, and nevertheless again descend and show themselves externally, so are the vitelli transmitted through the infundibulum from the ovary into the uterus. Its office is served, and even its form is imitated, by the funnel which we make use of when we pour fluids from one vessel into another having a narrower mouth.

Fabricius pursues his account of the uterus after having described the ovary, and in such an inverse order, that he premises a description of the superior portion or appendage of the uterus before he approaches the uterus itself. He assigns to it three turns or spirals, with somewhat too much of precision or determinateness, and settles the respective situations of these spirals, which are nevertheless of uncertain seat. Here, too, he very unnecessarily repeats his definition of the infundibulum. I would, therefore, in this place, beg to be allowed to give my own account of the uterus of the fowl, according to the anatomical method, which I consider the more convenient, and proceeding from external to internal parts, in opposition to the method of Fabricius.

In the fowl stripped of its feathers, the fundament will be observed not contracted circularly, as in other animals, but forming a depressed orifice, slit transversely, and consisting of two lips