The Works of William Harvey M.D. / Translated from the Latin with a life of the author

by William Harvey

The substance of the horns of the uterus in the hind and doe is skinny or fleshy, like the coats of the intestines, and has a few very minute veins ramified over it. This substance you may in anatomical fashion divide into several layers, and note different courses of its component fibres, fitting them to perform the several motions and actions required, retention, namely, and expulsion. I have myself frequently seen these cornua moving like earthworms, or in the manner in which the intestines may at any time be observed, twisting themselves with an undulatory motion, on laying open the abdomen of a recently slaughtered animal, by which they move on the chyle and excrements to inferior portions of the gut, as if they were surrounded and compressed with a ring forced over them, or were stripped between the fingers.

The uterine veins, as in woman, all arise from the vena cava, near the emulgents; the arteries (and this also is common to the deer and the human subject) arise from the crural branches of the descending aorta. And as in the pregnant woman the uterine vessels are relatively larger and more numerous than in any other part of the body, this is likewise the case in the pregnant hind and doe. The arteries, however, contrary to the arrangement in other parts of the body, are much more numerous than the veins; and air blown into them makes its way into the neighbouring veins, although the arteries cannot be inflated in their turn by blowing into the veins. This fact I also find mentioned by Master Riolanus; and it is a cogent argument for the circulation of the blood discovered by me; for he clearly proves that whilst there is a passage from the arteries into the veins, there is none backwards from the veins into the arteries. The arteries are more numerous than the veins, because a large supply of nourishment being required for the fœtus, it is only what is left unused that has to be returned by the latter channels.

In the deer as well as in the sheep, goat, and bisulcate animals generally, we find testicles; but these are mere little glands, which rather correspond in their proportions to the prostate or mesenteric glands, the use of which is to establish divarications for the veins, and to store up a fluid for lubricating the parts, than for secreting semen, concocting it into fecundity, and shedding it at the time of intercourse. I am myself especially moved to adopt this opinion, as well by numerous reasons which will be adduced elsewhere, as by the fact that in the rutting season, when the testes of the buck and hart enlarge and are replete with semen, and the cornua of the uterus of the hind and doe are greatly changed, the female testicles, as they are called, whether they be examined before or after intercourse, neither swell nor vary from their usual condition; they show no trace of being of the slightest use either in the business of intercourse or in that of generation.

It is surprising what a quantity of seminal fluid is found in the vesiculæ seminales and testicles of moles and the larger kinds of mice at the season of intercourse; this circumstance corresponds with what we have already noticed in the cock, and the great change perceptible in the organs of generation of both sexes; nevertheless, the glands, which are regarded as the female testes, continue all the while unchanged and without departure from their pristine appearance.

All that has now been said of the uterus and its horns in hinds and does applies in major part to viviparous animals in general, but not to the human female, inasmuch as she conceives in the body of the uterus, but all these, with the exception of the horse and ass, in the horns of the organ; and even the horse and ass, although they appear to carry their fruit in the uterus, still is the place of the conception in them rather of the nature of an uterine horn than the uterine body. For the place here is not bipartite indeed, but it is oblong, and different from the human uterus both in its situation, connexions, structure, and substance; it bears a greater affinity to the superior uterus or uterine process of the fowl, where the egg grows and becomes surrounded with the albumen, than to the uterus of the woman.

EXERCISE THE SIXTY-SIXTH.

Of the intercourse of the hind and doe.

So much for the account of the uterus of the female deer, where we have spoken briefly upon all that seemed necessary to the history of generation, viz. the ‘place’ of conception, and the parts instituted for its sake. We have still to speak of the action and office of this ‘place,’ in other words, of intercourse and conception.

The hind and doe admit the male at one and only one particular season of the year, namely, in the middle of September, after the Feast of the Holy Cross; and they bring forth after the middle of June, about the Feast of St. John the Baptist (24th June). They, therefore, go with young about nine months, not eight, as Pliny says;[337] with us, at all events, they produce in the ninth month after they have taken the buck.

At the rutting season the bucks herd with the does; at other times they keep severally apart, the males, particularly the older ones, associating together, and the females and younger males trooping and feeding in company. The rutting season lasts for a whole month, and it begins later if the weather have been dry, earlier if it have been wet. In Spain, as I am informed, the deer are hardly in rut before the beginning of October, wet weather not usually setting in there until this time; but with us the rutting season rarely continues beyond the middle of October.