Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/580

 only in exceedingly rare instances that I met with such matter, and as twenty days had then passed since the doe had had any intercourse with the buck, and farther, as the matter was not viscid and tenacious, or spumous, such as the seminal fluid presents itself to us, but rather friable, purulent looking, and inclining to yellow, I came to the conclusion that it was the effect of accident, a sweat or exudation in consequence of violent exercise previous to death ; just as in a catarrh the thinner defluxion of the nose is by and by changed into a thicker mucus.

Having frequently shown this alteration in the uterus to his majesty the king as the first indication of pregnancy, and satis- fied him at the same time that there was nothing in the shape of semen or conception to be found in the cavity of the organ, and he had spoken of this as an extraordinary fact to several about him, a discussion at length arose : the keepers and hunts- men asserted at first that it was but an argument of a tardy conception occasioned by the want of rain. But by and by, when they saw the rutting season pass away, I still con- tinuing to maintain that things were in the same state, they began to say that I was both deceived myself and had misled the king, and that there must of necessity be something of the conception to be found in the uterus. These men, however, when I got them to bring their own eyes to the inquiry, soon gave up the point. The physicians, nevertheless, held it among their aSvvara their impossibilities that any conception should ever be formed without the presence of the semen masculinum, or some trace remaining of a fertile intercourse within the cavity of the womb.

That this important question might be the more satisfac- torily settled in all time to come, his highness the king ordered about a dozen does to be separated from the bucks towards the beginning of October, and secluded in the inclosure, which is called the course, at Hampton Court, because the animal placed there has no means of escape from the dogs let loose upon it. Now that no one might say the animals thus secluded retained any of the semen received from the last connexions with the male, I dissected several of them before the rutting season had passed, and ascertained that no seminal fluid re- mained in the uterus, although the others were found to be