Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/570

 left open for the escape of flatus, menstrual blood, and other excreted fluids; but even the smallest and most subtile things, air, for instance, and the seminal fluid are precluded all access from without.

In all animals this uterine orifice is found obstructed or plugged up in the same way as it is wont to be in women, among whom we have sometimes known the outlet so much con- stricted that the menses, lochia, and other humours were retained in the womb, and became the exciting cause of most severe hysterical symptoms. In such cases it became necessary to contrive a suitable instrument with which the os uteri being opened, the matters that stagnated within were discharged, when all the accidents disappeared. By this contrivance in- jections could also be thrown into the cavity of the uterus, and by means of these I have cured internal ulcers of the womb, and have occasionally even found a remedy for barrenness.

The cavity of the uterus in the deer is extremely small, and the thickness of its walls not great ; the body of the womb in these animals is, in fact, but a kind of vestibule, or ante-room, in the cavity of which a passage opens to the right and left into either cornu.

For the parts are different in almost all animals from what they are in woman, in whom the principal part of the uterus is its body, and the cervix and cornua are mere appendices, that scarcely attract attention. The neck is short; the cornua are slender round processes extending from the fundus uteri like a couple of tubes, which anatomists indeed commonly speak of as the vasa ejaculatoria. In the deer, however, as in all other quadrupeds, except the ape and the solipeds, the chief organ of generation is not the body but the horns of the uterus. In the human female and the solipedia, the uterus is the { place ' of conception, in all the rest the conception is perfected in the cornua ; and this is the reason why writers so commonly speak of the cornua uteri in the lower animals under the simple name of the uterus, saying that the uterus in certain animals is bipartite, whilst in others it is not, understanding by the word uterus the place in which conception takes place, this in the majority of vivipa- rous and especially of multiparous animals being the cornua, to which moreover all the arteries and veins distributed to the organs of generation are sent. We shall therefore, in treating