Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/522

 mouth is enormous, and the tongue lies in its middle ; the eyes are small, without lids to cover them ; the middle integument of the regions of the forehead and sinciput is not yet cartilaginous, far less bony; but the occiput is somewhat firm and in some sort cartilaginous, indicating that the skull already begins to acquire solidity.

The organs of generation have now made their appearance, but the testes are contained within the abdomen, in the situation of the female uterus, the scrotum still remaining empty. The female organs are yet imperfect, and the uterus with its tubes resembles the two-horned uterus of the lamb.

The placenta, of larger size, and now attached to the uterus, comprises nearly one half of the entire conception, and pre- sented itself to my eye as a fleshy or fungous excrescence of the womb, so firmly was its gibbous portion connected all around with the uterine walls, which had now grown to greater thickness. The branches of the umbilical vessels struck into the placenta like the roots of a tree into the ground, and by their means was the conception now, for the first time, con- nected with the uterus.

The brain presented itself as a large and soft coagulum, full of ample vessels. The ventricles of the heart were of equal capacity, and their walls of the same thickness. In the thorax, and covered by the ribs, three cavities, nearly of the same dimen- sions, were perceived ; of these the lowest was occupied by the lungs, which are full of blood, and of the same colour as the liver and kidneys ; the middle cavity was filled by the heart and pericardium; the superior cavity, again, was possessed by the gland called the thymus, which is now of very ample size.

In the stomach there was some chyle discovered, not very different in character from the fluid in which the embryo swam. It also contained some white curdled matter, not unlike the mucous sordes which the nurse washes particularly from between the folds of the skin of new-born infants. In the upper part of the intestines there was a small quantity of excremeutitious or chylous matter ; the lower bowels contained meconium. In the urinary bladder there was urine, and in the gall bladder bile. The intestinum coecum, that appendix of the colon, was empty as in the adult, and apparently superfluous, not as in the lower animals the hog, horse, hare, constituting as it were another