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By the first it is nourished, and by the second clothed and defended from wrong. Of each of these I shall speak distinctly; and first, Of the Umbilicars, or Navel Vessels. These are four in number, viz.: one vein, two arteries, and the vessel which is called the urachos.

These four vessels before mentioned, viz., one vein, two arteries and the urachos, join near the navel, and are united by a skin which they have from the chorion and so become like a gut or rope, and are altogether void of sensibility, and this is that which women call the navel-string.

The chorion is an outward skin which compasseth the child in the womb. The amnios is the inner skin which compasseth the child in the womb. The alantois is the skin that holds the urine of the child during the time that it abides in the womb. The urachos is the vessel that conveys the urine from the child in the womb to the alantois. I now proceed to

A nervous or sinewy production is led from the bottom of the bladder of the infant to the navel, and this is called urachos, and its use is, to convey the urine of the infant from the bladder to the alantois.

And Johannes Fernelius speaks of the same thing that happened to a man of thirty years of age, who having a stoppage at the neck of the bladder, his urine issued out of his navel for many months together, and that without any prejudice at all to his health, which he ascribes to the ill lying of his navel, whereby the urachos was not well dried.

Those who will have it to be a membrane, say it is white, soft and exceedingly thin, and just under the placenta, where it is knit to the urachos, from which it receives the urine; and its office is to keep it separate from the sweat, that the saltness of it may not offend the tender skin of the child.