Dr. Pereira's Elements of materia medica and therapeutics : abridged and adapted for the use of medicine and pharmaceutical practitioners and students and comprising all of the medicines of the British Pharmacopœia, with such others as are frequently ordered in prescriptions or required by the physician / edited by Robert Bently and Theophilus Redwood.

  • Jonathan Pereira
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Dr. Pereira's Elements of materia medica and therapeutics : abridged and adapted for the use of medicine and pharmaceutical practitioners and students and comprising all of the medicines of the British Pharmacopœia, with such others as are frequently ordered in prescriptions or required by the physician / edited by Robert Bently and Theophilus Redwood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    1094/1132 (page 1062)
    [§ Castoreum. Castor. The dried preputial follicles and their secretion, obtained from the Beaver, Castor Fiber, Linn., and separated from the somewhat shorter and smaller oil sacs Fig. 126. which are frequently attached to them. From the Hudson's Bay Territory.] Anatomy of the Castor Sacs. —Both male and female bea- vers are furnished with castor sacs or follicles: hence it will be convenient to consider them in the two sexes separately. Male Castor Sacs. — If the Cantor Fiber. animal be placed on his back, b. Scales of the tail. we observe, near the tail, a hollow (called by some a cloaca), inclosed by a large wrinkled somewhat hairy cutaneous protuberance, which, according to Perrault, is easily contracted and dilated, not only by a sphincter, as the anus, but simply like a slit. In this hollow the anus, the prepuce, and the oil sacs open. When the skin of the abdomen is removed, four emi- nences, covered by their appropriate muscles, are brought into view. They are placed between the pubic arch and the so-called cloaca. The two nearest the pubes are the castor sacs, while those next the cloaca are the oil sacs. Between the two castor sacs, in the male, lies the penis, with its bone ; it is lodged in a long prepu- tial canal, which terminates in the cloaca, and has some analogy to a vagina; so that there is some difficulty to determine, until the skin is removed, whether the individual be male or female. The penis points towards the tail, not towards the navel. The castor sacs open by a common aperture into the preputial canal. This aperture is about one inch in width, and is placed opposite the extremity of the glans penis in the relaxed condition of the organ, and about one inch from the orifice of the prepuce. The castor sacs are pyriform and compressed. They communicate with each other at their cervical portion; but their fundi diverge outwards and towards the pubes. Each castor sac is composed of an external or cellular coat, which incloses muscular fibres. Within these fibres lies a very vascular coat, which covers the scaly or glandular coat, and sends processes in between the convolutions of the latter. The scaly or glandular coat forms numerous folds or convolutions, which are largest and most numerous in the fundus of the sac. Externally,