Graphic illustrations of abortion and the diseases of menstruation / Consisting of Twelve Plates from Drawings Engraved on Stone, and Coloured by Mr. J. Perry, and Two Copper-plates from the Philosophical Transactions, Coloured by the Same Artist. the Whole Representing Forty-five Specimens of Aborted Ova and Adventitious Productions of the Uterus, With Preliminary Observations, Explanations of the Figures and Remarks, Anatomical and Physiological.

by A. B. Granville

REMARKS.

I imagine that these Ovula pass away from the womb almost immediately after they have entered it, owing to a tardy or deficient formation of that peculiar lining which the uterine cavity begins to weave for itself from the first moment of a successful copulation, and to some part of which the Ovula are destined to adhere.

The preceding objects are represented of their natural size, and as they lost their colour during the first maceration in water, owing to the great readiness with which the mossy vessels discharge their blood, the colour adopted in the Plate is that which they attain afterwards, and such as it appeared when the artist sketched them. They have in every instance been examined and dissected under water. Such early Ovula are not rare. In the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of London there are four such specimens, marked 3432—3—4—5 in red ink on the black varnished cover of the bottles[^[26]]. In Sir Charles Clarke’s collection there are also several. I have likewise examined many of them in Meckel’s magnificent museum; but it is in that of the late Professor Sœmmering that I have been gratified by the sight of not a few beautifully prepared and arranged specimens of this early stage of the human Ovum. Among them were the identical preparations which he selected and arranged in a graduated series of human embryos, and afterwards caused to be delineated and engraved, for his valuable work entitled “Icones Embryonum humanorum.”