Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/536

 swallowing the fluid, though none of them was ever seen to touch any of the excrements of their young.

Fabricius spoke of this fluid as saline and acrimonious, be- cause he believed it to be sweat. But what inconvenience, I beseech you, were sweat to the chick, already covered with its feathers ? if indeed any one ever saw a chicken sweat. Nor do I think he could have said that the use of this fluid in the egg was, by its moistening and lubrifying qualities, to facilitate the birth of the chick ; for the drier and older the shell of the egg, the more friable and fragile it becomes. Finally, were it the sweat of the embryo, or foetus, it ought to be most abundant nearest the period of parturition : the larger the foetus and the more food it consumes, the more sweat must it necessarily secrete. But shortly before the exclusion of the chick from the egg, namely, about the nineteenth or twen- tieth day, there is none of the fluid to be seen, because as the chick grows it is gradually taken up ; so that if the thing be rightly viewed, the fluid in question ought rather to be regarded as nutriment than as excrement, particularly as he has said that the chick in the egg breathes, and lets its chirping be heard, which it certainly would not do were it surrounded with water.

But all experienced obstetricians know that the watery fluid of the secundines is of no great use either in lubri- cating the parts or in facilitating the progress of partu- rition in the way Fabricius would have it. For the parts sur- rounding the vulva are relaxed of themselves, and by a kind of proper maturity at the full time, without any assistance from the uterine waters ; and particularly those that offer the greatest obstacles to the advance of the foetus, namely, the ossa pubis and the os coccygis, to which the attention of the mid- wife is especially directed in assisting the woman in labour. For midwives are much less studious to anoint the soft parts with any emollient salves, lest they tear, than careful to pull the os coccygis outwards, a business in which, if the fingers do not suffice, they have recourse to the uterine speculum, ap- plied by the hand of the experienced surgeon, an instrument having three sides or branches, one of which bearing on the os coccygis, the other two on the ossa pubis, the business of disten- sion is effected by force. For the head of the child that is about