change may be produced by a beginning digestion, is found in
the stomach of the fetus; and the white of the egg is found, in the same
manner in the stomach of the chick.

Numerous hairs, similar to those of its skin, are perpetually found among
the contents of the stomach in new-born calves; which must therefore have
licked themselves before their nativity. Blasii Anatom. See Sect. XVI. 2.
on Instinct.

The chick in the egg is seen gently to move in its surrounding fluid, and
to open and shut its mouth alternately. The same has been observed in
puppies. Haller's El. Phys. I. 8. p. 201.

A column of ice has been seen to reach down the oesophagus from the mouth
to the stomach in a frozen fetus; and this ice was the liquor amnii frozen.

The meconium, or first faeces, in the bowels of new-born infants evince,
that something has been digested; and what could this be but the liquor
amnii together with the recrements of the gastric juice and gall, which
were necessary for its digestion?

There have been recorded some monstrous births of animals without heads,
and consequently without mouths, which seem to have been delivered on
doubtful authority, or from inaccurate observation. There are two of such
monstrous productions however better attested; one of a human fetus,
mentioned by Gipson in the Scots Medical Essays; which having the gula
impervious was furnished with an aperture into the wind-pipe, which
communicated below into the gullet; by means of which the liquor amnii
might be taken into the stomach before nativity without danger of
suffocation, while the fetus had no occasion to breathe. The other
monstrous fetus is described by Vander Wiel, who asserts, that he saw a
monstrous lamb, which had no mouth; but instead of it was furnished with an
opening in the lower part of the neck into the stomach. Both these
instances evidently favour the doctrine of the fetus being nourished by the
mouth; as otherwise there had been no necessity for new or unnatural
apertures into the stomach, when the natural ones were deficient?

From these facts and observations we may safely infer, that the fetus in
the womb is nourished by the fluid which surrounds it; which during the
first period of gestation is absorbed by the naked lacteals; and is
afterwards swallowed into the stomach and bowels, when these organs are
perfected; and lastly that the placenta is an organ for the purpose of
giving due oxygenation to the blood of the fetus;