Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/300

 supply of the albumen, and extends downwards to the most inferior and capacious portion the termination of the uterus in which the chalazse, the two membranes, and the shell are formed., i"

The whole substance of the uterus, particularly the parts about the plicae, both in its body and in its process, are covered with numerous ramifications of blood-vessels, the majority of which are arterial rather than venous branches.

The folds which appear oblique and transverse in the interior of the uterus are fleshy substances; they have a fine white or milky colour, and a sluggish fluid oozes from them, so that the whole of the interior of the uterus, as well the body as the process, is moistened with an abundance of thin albumen, whereby the vitellus as it descends is increased, and the albumen that is deposited around it is gradually perfected.

The uterus of the fowl is rarely found otherwise than con- taining an egg, either sticking in the spiral process or arrived in the body of the organ. If you inflate this process when it is empty it then presents itself as an oblique and contorted tube, and rises like a turbinated shell or cone into a point. The general arrangement of the spirals and folds composing the uterus, is such as we have already observed it in the vulva : there is a ready enough passage for the descending egg, but scarce any return even for air blown in towards the superior parts.

The processus uteri with its spirals, very small in the young pullet, is so much diminished in the hen which has ceased laying, that it shrinks into the most delicate description of membrane, and then entirely disappears, so that no trace of it remains, any more than of the ovary or infundibulum : nothing but a certain glandular-looking and spongy mass appears in the place these bodies occupied, which in a boiled fowl tastes sweet, and bears some affinity to the pancreas and thymus of young mammiferous animals, which, in the vernacular tongue, are called the sweet- bread.

The uterus and the processus uteri are connected with the

back by means of a membranous attachment, which Fabricius

designates by the name of " mesometrium ; because the second

uterus, together with this vascular and membranous body, may

' Fab. 1. c. p. 17.