Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/523

 stomach. The omentum, or apron, floated over the intestines at large like a thin and transparent veil or cloud.

The kidneys at this epoch are not yet formed into a smooth and continuous rounded mass, as in the adult, but are com- pacted of numerous smaller masses, as we see them in the calf and sturgeon, as if there were a renal globule or nipple placed at the extremity of each division of the ureter, from the orifice of which the urine distilled. Over the kidneys two bodies, first observed by Eustachius, are discovered, very abundantly sup- plied with blood, so that their veins, which anatomists designate as venae adiposse, are not much smaller than the emulgents themselves. The liver and spleen, according to their several proportions, are equally full of blood.

I may here observe, by the way, that in every strong and healthy human foetus we everywhere discover milk ; it is parti- cularly abundant in the thymus gland, though it is also found in the pancreas, through the whole of the mesentery, and in certain lacteal veins and glands, as it seems, situated between the divisions of the mesenteric vessels. Moreover, it can be pressed and indeed sometimes flows spontaneously from the breasts of newly -born infants, and nurses imagine that this is beneficial to the infant.

And it clearly appears that this fluid, which abounds in the ovum, is no excrementitious matter thrown off by the embryo, nothing like urine or sweat, because its relative quantity is diminished as the period of parturition approaches, when the foetus is of course larger, and, as it consumes a greater quantity of nutriment, accumulates excrementitious matter more abun- dantly than it did in the first months of pregnancy. Let it be added, that the bladder is at this time distended with urine. For my own part I have never been able to discover that con- duit for the urine, from the bladder to the umbilicus, which anatomists describe under the name of urachus ; I have, on the contrary, frequently seen urine escaping by the penis, but never by any urachus, when the bladder was pressed upon with the hand.

So much for what I have observed with reference to the order of the parts in the development of the human foetus.

In the fourth and last process the parts of the lowest state and order are produced, those, namely, that do not exist as