Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/599

 nor does the placenta in the human subject contain any collec- tions of albuminous matter in distinct cavities.

Modern medical writers, following the Arabians, speak of three nutritious humours dew, gluten, and cambium ; these Fernelius designates nutritious juices ; as if he had wished to imply that the parts of our bodies were not immediately nou- rished by the blood as ultimate nutriment, but by these second- ary juices. The first of them, like dew, bathes all the minutest particles of the body on every side : this fluid, become thicker by an ulterior concoction, and adhering to the parts, is called gluten ; finally, altered and assimilated by the proper virtue of the part, it is called cambium.

He who espoused such views might designate the matter which is contained in the cotyledonous cavities of the deer as gluten or nutritious albumen, and maintain that as the ulti- mate nourishment destined for each of the particular parts of the foetus it was analogous to the albumen or vitellus of the egg. For as we but lately stated, with Aristotle, that the yelk of the egg was analogous to milk, so do we think it not un- reasonable to assert, that the matter lodged in the cotyledons, or acetabula of the uterine placenta, stands instead of milk to the foetus so long as it remains in the uterus ; in this way the caruncles approve themselves a kind of internal mamma3, the nutritive matter of which, transferred at the period of parturi- tion to the proper mammae, there assumes the nature of milk, an arrangement by which the foetus is seen to be nourished with the same food after it has begun its independent exist- ence, as it was whilst it lodged in the uterus. Between the two-coloured eggs of oviparous animals, consequently, or the eggs that consist of a white and a yelk, and the ova or con- ceptions of viviparous animals, there is only this difference, that in the former the vitellus (which is a secondary nutritive matter) is prepared within the egg, and at the period of birth, being stored within the abdomen of the young creature, serves it as food ; whilst in the latter, the nutritive juice is laid up within acetabula, and after birth is transferred to the mamma?; so that the chick is nourished with milk inclosed in its interior, whilst the foetus of the viviparous animal draws its nourish- ment from the breasts of its mother.

In the months of January, February, &c., as nothing new or