The Works of William Harvey M.D.: Translated from the Latin with a life of the authorHarvey, William
Science
The Works of William Harvey M.D.: Translated from the Latin with a life of the author
Harvey, William
Blood -- Circulation -- Early works to 1800; Embryology -- Early works to 1800; Physiology -- Early works to 1800
The folds which appear oblique and transverse in the interior of the
uterus are fleshy substances; they have a fine white or milky colour,
and a sluggish fluid oozes from them, so that the whole of the interior
of the uterus, as well the body as the process, is moistened with an
abundance of thin albumen, whereby the vitellus as it descends is
increased, and the albumen that is deposited around it is gradually
perfected.
The uterus of the fowl is rarely found otherwise than containing an egg,
either sticking in the spiral process or arrived in the body of the
organ. If you inflate this process when it is empty it then presents
itself as an oblique and contorted tube, and rises like a turbinated
shell or cone into a point. The general arrangement of the spirals and
folds composing the uterus, is such as we have already observed it in
the vulva: there is a ready enough passage for the descending egg, but
scarce any return even for air blown in towards the superior parts.
The processus uteri with its spirals, very small in the young pullet, is
so much diminished in the hen which has ceased laying, that it shrinks
into the most delicate description of membrane, and then entirely
disappears, so that no trace of it remains, any more than of the ovary
or infundibulum: nothing but a certain glandular-looking and spongy mass
appears in the place these bodies occupied, which in a boiled fowl
tastes sweet, and bears some affinity to the pancreas and thymus of
young mammiferous animals, which, in the vernacular tongue, are called
the sweetbread.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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