Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 1 of 2).djvu/600

 worthy of note occurs which has not been already mentioned, (more than the growth of the hair, teeth, horns, &c.) but the parts only grow larger without reference to the process of gene- ration, it seems unnecessary to say more upon such points at present.

I have frequently examined the conceptions of sheep during the same intervals. These I find, as in the deer, extending into both horns of the uterus, and presenting the figure of a wallet or double sausage. In several of them I found two foetuses ; in others only one : they were without a trace of wool on the surface, and the eyelids were so closely glued to- gether that they could not be opened; the hooves, however, were present. Where there were two embryos they were con- tained in the opposite horns of the uterus, and without any regard to sex with reference to the right or left horn, the male being sometimes in the right, sometimes in the left, and the female the same ; both, however, were, in every instance, in- cluded within one and the same common external membrane or chorion. The extreme ends of this membrane were stained on either hand with a yellow or bilious excrement, and appeared to contain something turbid or excrementitious in their interior. ^Many caruncles, or miniature placentas of different sizes, were discovered, and otherwise disposed than in the hind and doe. In the sheep they look like rounded fungi with the foot-stalks broken off, and are contained in the coats of the uterus; their rounded or convex aspects are turned to the uterus, (a circumstance, by the way, common to the cow and sheep,) their concave aspects, which are the smooth ones, being turned towards the foetus. The larger branches of the vessels are also distributed to the concave portion, as in the human placenta. The branches in extension of the umbilical vessels connected with the caruncles, grow pretty firmly into them, so that when I attempted to separate them the rounded portion was rather torn from the interior of the uterus than from the ovum or conception ; different, consequently, from what we observed in the deer, where the chorion was readily detached from the cotyledons of the caruncules, and where the convexity of the caruncule, connected with the conception, is separable, whilst the concavity, or rather the pedicle or root, is firmly adherent to the uterus. In other respects the function