Many claims are made that a child is seven months at birth which are based on the mis-counting of the date of conception or a desire to conceal a pre-marital conception. When one is shown, as one sometimes is, a bouncing, healthy, ordinary baby, and told that it was “a very forward seven months child,” those who know can only smile or sigh, according to the circumstances, for an ordinary, healthy, bouncing baby with nails and well formed skin has never yet been generated in seven months. The seventh month is the time of greatest danger for a late miscarriage, and many have been the disappointments of parents who ardently desired a child, but who lost it through premature birth at the seventh month. I have often wished to know why this should be so, and have found no satisfactory answer or indication of any scientific reason for this, but when revolving all the possibilities of ancestral reminiscence, it occurred to me that possibly our earlier ancestors, ancestors in fact so early as to be scarcely human, were born at the seventh month. I was, therefore, interested to find that for some of the monkeys seven months is the date of normal birth. Possibly some such ancestral characteristic may make the seventh month a critical time in the development of the human embryo, a time when it inherits the reminiscence of the possibility of separating itself from its mother and coming into the outer world. The times, moreover, when birth is most liable are those few days in each month which correspond to the regular menstrual flow in the woman, the periods which would have taken place at each twenty-eight days had not the child been developing. It is, therefore, often desirable, particularly for the later months, for the woman to take one or two days of complete rest, or even to remain in bed during that dangerous day or two, so as to minimize the possibility of a miscarriage. The same applies of course to some extent to the eighth month, but curiously enough, miscarriages in the eighth month appear to be less frequent. It is also popularly said that it is more difficult to rear a child born in the eighth month than one born in the seventh, though this does not appear to be true. The last week or two of the child’s antenatal existence are used by it in finishing itself off; growing its tiny shell-like nails, losing the downy hair which covered its body earlier in its existence, and in a sense preparing itself, and particularly its skin, for contact with the outer world which is to come. Its movements are very active, and if it is in the most perfect position, the head tends to sink deep down towards the canal approaching the circle of bone through which it will have to pass (see Chapter II).