CAUSES OF LABOR. 255 



vitality of the fostus being generally proportioned to that of the organ 

 in which it is contained, it is quite natural that the labor should be 

 more prompt and easy where the child is robust and healthy than 

 where it is feeble or diseased. 



648. Those labors that sometimes take place after the death of 

 the woman, and form the principle argument of the partisans of the 

 ancient hypothesis, furnish on the contrary a decisive proof in sup- 

 port of the opposite doctrine. In these cases the children have 

 always been found lifeless between the mother's legs; it might even 

 be affirmed that they died first. They escape from the womb by 

 means of a power wholly extrinsic to them; after death, the organs of 

 the life of relation, especially the muscles, become relaxed, while 

 those of vegetative life continue for some time in possession of their 

 contractility; sometimes the abdomen becomes filled with gas with 

 surprising rapidity; so that if the labor is far advanced when the 

 woman dies, it is not a surprising matter that the uterus, being me- 

 chanically compressed from without, meeting with no further resis- 

 tance from the perineum, and still retaining the power of contraction, 

 is enabled completely to expel the ovum without any necessary par- 

 ticipation on the part of the foetus. This was evidently the nature 

 of the case with the woman named Homer, who gave birth to a dead 

 child, thirty-four hours after she had herself ceased to exist. 



649. In the second place, observation has demonstrated that de- 

 livery takes place pretty nearly in the same manner whatever be the 

 period at which it happens: now, where abortion takes place in the 

 first half of the period of utero-gestation, it is evidently impossible 

 for the foetus to make the least efibrt to escape from the organs. 

 How can so delicate a creature be supposed capable of dilating an 

 opening, through which the most vigorous man might vainly essay to 

 pass his hand? Who does not know that until the fourth or fifth 

 month it is scarcely capable of making a ^ew motions; that it is 

 rarely strong enough to be born alive, or at least to live over a few 

 minutes after birth? Were it to act of itself in labor, it would com- 

 mence by rupturing the membranes: however, the bag of waters is 

 not broken until the last stage of labor; in some cases it does not 

 break at all, and the ovum comes away whole; besides, the very 

 moment when the bag of membranes presses upon the cervix in 

 order to engage in it, is the time when the foetus retires from it, 

 instead of pressing upon it. If it be true that the birth of a dead or 

 very feeble child is generally effected more slowly than that of a 

 foetus that is strong and full of vigor, it is also true, that the differ- 

 ence between the birth of a living and dead one is not sensible. 

 In all cases, the after-birth comes away at last, and we are compelled 



