Rapid Parturition Without Usual Symptoms.--Births unattended by symptoms that are the usual precursors of labor often lead to speedy deliveries in awkward places. According to Willoughby, in Darby, February 9, 1667, a poor fool, Mary Baker, while wandering in an open, windy, and cold place, was delivered by the sole assistance of Nature, Eve's midwife, and freed of her afterbirth. The poor idiot had leaned against a wall, and dropped the child on the cold boards, where it lay for more than a quarter of an hour with its funis separated from the placenta. She was only discovered by the cries of the infant. In "Carpenter's Physiology" is described a remarkable case of instinct in an idiotic girl in Paris, who had been seduced by some miscreant; the girl had gnawed the funis in two, in the same manner as is practised by the lower animals. From her mental imbecility it can hardly be imagined that she had any idea of the object of this separation, and it must have been instinct that impelled her to do it. Sermon says the wife of Thomas James was delivered of a lusty child while in a wood by herself. She put the child in an apron with some oak leaves, marched stoutly to her husband's uncle's house a half mile distant, and after two hours' rest went on her journey one mile farther to her own house; despite all her exertions she returned the next day to thank her uncle for the two hours' accommodation. There is related the history of a case of a woman who was delivered of a child on a mountain during a hurricane, who took off her gown and wrapped the child up in it, together with the afterbirth, and walked two miles to her cottage, the funis being unruptured. Harvey relates a case, which he learned from the President of Munster, Ireland, of a woman with child who followed her husband, a soldier in the army, in daily march. They were forced to a halt by reason of a river, and the woman, feeling the pains of labor approaching, retired to a thicket, and there alone brought forth twins. She carried them to the river, washed them herself, did them up in a cloth, tied them to her back, and that very day marched, barefooted, 12 miles with the soldiers, and was none the worse for her experience. The next day the Deputy of Ireland and the President of Munster, affected by the story, to repeat the words of Harvey, "did both vouchsafe to be godfathers of the infants."