occurred in our own times is that communicated to the College of Physicians by _Dr. Maton_:[424] Mrs. T—— an Italian lady, remarkable for her fecundity, was delivered of a male child at Palermo, on the 12th of November, 1807, under very distressing circumstances, having been dropt on a bundle of straw in an uninhabited room at midnight, and although the infant at the time of his birth had every appearance of health, he lived only nine days; on February the 2d, 1808, (not quite three calendar months from the preceding _accouchement_) Mrs. T—— was delivered of another male infant, completely formed, and apparently in perfect health; the child however fell a victim to the measles at the age of three months. _Dr. Granville_, in a paper entitled “On the Mal-formation of the Uterine System,”[425] takes occasion to observe with respect to the above case, that “it merely goes to prove the occasional co-existence of separate ova in utero, and proves nothing farther; the lady, whose prolific disposition is much descanted upon in that paper, and with whom twin cases were a common occurrence,” continues Dr. Granville, “was delivered of a male child sometime in November, 1807, ‘_under circumstances very distressing to the parents, and on a bundle of straw_,’ and again in February, 1808, of another male infant, ‘_completely formed_!’—mark the expression, for it was not made use of in describing the first. The former died ‘_without any apparent cause_’ when nine days old; the other lived longer. Now can we consider this otherwise than as a common case of twins, in which one of the fœtuses came into the world at the sixth, and the other at the ninth month of pregnancy, owing to the ova being quite distinct and separate? Had this not been the case, the _distressing circumstances_, which brought on the premature contraction of the womb, so as to expel _part_ of its contents in November, as in the simplest cases of premature labour, would have caused the expulsion of the whole, or in other words, of both ova, in that same month; and we should not have heard of the second _accouchement_ in the following February; which led the author of the paper in question to bring the case forward as one of superfœtation, in opposition to what he has called ‘the scepticism of modern physiologists.’ Had it been proved that the child, of which the body in question was delivered, had _reached its full term_ of utero-gestation in November, and that she had brought forth another child one, two, or three months afterwards, of equally full growth, then a case something like superfœtation would have really occurred, and scepticism would have been staggered.” In consequence of the doubts thus expressed by _Dr. Granville_, the author of the present work, actuated only by a desire after truth, applied to _Dr. Maton_ for a farther explanation of those particular points upon which the merits of the case would seem to turn;