Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/363

 The yelk is now contained in the abdomen among the in- testines : and this is the case not merely whilst the chick is in the egg, but even after its exclusion, and when it is running about following its mother in search of food. So that what Aristotle frequently asserts appears to be absolutely true, viz., that the yelk is destined for the food of the chick ; and the chick does certainly use it for food, included in his interior as it is, during the few first days after his exclusion, and until such time as his bill gains the hardness requisite to break and prepare his food, and his stomach the strength necessary to digest it. And, indeed, the yelk of the egg is very analogous to milk. Aristotle gives us his support in this opinion in the place already so frequently referred to r 1 " The chick now lies over much of the yellow, which at last diminishes, and, in pro- cess of time, disappears entirely, being all taken into the body of the bird, where it is stored, so that on the tenth day after the exclusion of the chick, if the belly be laid open, you will still find a little of the yelk upon the intestines." I have myself found certain remains of the yelk even upon the thirteenth day ; and if the argument derivable from the duct of the umbilical veins which we have described as terminating in the porta of the liver by one or another trunk, be of any avail, the chick is already nourished almost in the same manner as it is subsequently, the sustenance being attracted from the yelk by the umbilical vessels, in the same way as chyle is by and by transmitted by the mesenteric veins from the intestines. For the vessels ter- minate in either case in the porta of the liver, to which the nourishment attracted in the same way is in like manner trans- mitted. It is not necessary, therefore, to have recourse to any lacteal vessels of the mesentery, which, in the feathered tribes, are nowhere to be distinguished.

Let me be permitted here to add what I have frequently found : With a view to discovering more distinctly the relative situations of the embryo and the fluids, I have boiled an egg hard, from the fourteenth day of the incubation up to the day when the exclusion would have taken place, the major part of the albumen being already consumed, and the vitellus divided.

1 Hist. Anim. lib. vi, cap. 3.