Note on the penetration of the spermatozoon into the interior of the ovum / by Martin Barry, M.D.

  • Barry, M. (Martin), 1802-1855.
Date:
[1854]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Note on the penetration of the spermatozoon into the interior of the ovum / by Martin Barry, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    From the Philosophical Magazine for May 18 NOTE ON THE PENETRATION OF THE SPERMATOZOON INTO THE INTERIOR OF THE OVUM. BY MARTIN BARRY, M.D., F.R.S. THE fact that the spermatozoon penetrates into the interior of the ovum was pubhshed by myself in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London for 1840. Further observations enabled me to record the same as established, in the Philosophical Transactions for 1843. And in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for October 1843, will be found a drawing I gave of an ovum of the Rabbit containing spermatozoa —nine in number, with the statement that I once counted more than twenty in an ovum of this animal. These obsei-vations were held by physiologists to have been a mistake, an opinion which lasted up to the year 1852, when Nelson confii-med them in ova of an Entozoon, Keber in ova of the freshwater Mussels Unio and Anodonta, and Newport in ova of the Frog. And the present note contains, I believe, the fii'st announcement in this country of their having been confirmed in the Mammalia themselves. I have just received a letter from a friend in Germany informing me of a paper published by Prof. BischoflP, dated March 15, 1854*, in which it is stated that spermatozoa have at lengA been seen within the zona, not only by R. Wagner, Henle, Baum, and Meissner, but even by Bischoff himself, who up to 1852 had considered my observations as bom of the imagination, but now candidly acknowledges that he had done me injustice, the mistake having been his own. And he remarks, that Barry was certainly the first to see sper- matozoa in the interior, not only of the mammiferous ovum, but of any ova. Professor Bischoff might have added, that for a dozen years Barry had a melancholy and not veiy enviable monopoly of the said observations. And it may now be mentioned that in this respect they resembled certain others, for confirmation of which I have always felt that I could afi'ord to bide my time. Thus I have at length received notice from a physiologist on the Continent of a work he is about to publish, containing a confir- mation of my fact announced in Muller's Archiv for 1850, that cilia are composed of spirals. * Entitled, Bestatigung dcs von Dr. New-port hei den Bntrachieni und Dr. Barry bei den Kaninchen behaupteten Eindringens der Spermatozoiden in das Ei.