This fact also may be easily accounted for. Abortion is undoubtedly more common in the earlier than in the later months of pregnancy, because the sensible signs of fœtal vitality are then less permanently present, and the conscience is then better able to persuade itself that the child may possibly be without life, or the alarm wholly a false one. It is less common with first than with subsequent children, though instances of its occurrence with the former are certainly not rare. A woman who has never been pregnant does not, as a general rule, conceive as readily as one who has already been impregnated before, perhaps partly from the fact that intercourse, under certain circumstances, is more likely to be excessive in such cases, at times producing acute or subacute inflammation of the cervix uteri, and consequent sterility, as is so constantly observed in prostitutes, very many of whom, upon ceasing their trade, after accumulating a little property, as in France, or upon being sent to out-lying colonies, as in England, and becoming married, at once fall pregnant. The unmarried woman, if _enceinte_, has not the opportunity of lying by for a few days' sickness, without exciting suspicion, that the married can easily seize for themselves. She is often not so conversant with the early symptoms of gestation, and is more prone to wait until its existence has been rendered certain by the sensation of quickening, in the hope, doubtless, not unfrequently, that this certainty may persuade her paramour to marriage, instead of deciding him against it, as is so often the case. It may be allowed, I think, that infanticide, the murder of a child after its birth, or its exposure to the vicissitudes and perils of chance, is more common among the unmarried, but that destruction of the fœtus in utero, the rather prevails where the rites of law and religion would seem to have extended to that fœtus every possible safeguard. In the latest of the papers upon the subject of abortion, to which we have already alluded, there is furnished additional evidence as to the frequency of induced miscarriage.