THE GENITAL GLANDS 9 



no means invariable. If it were so, the Jewish race 

 would probably have become extinct, because, in 

 obedience to the Levitical law, amongst strict Jews 

 husband and wife Hve apart during and for some 

 days after menstruation. 



There is some evidence that in primitive man 

 there was only one annual period of special fertihty. 

 There is a Javan tribe amongst which all the births 

 are said to take place in February. Many animals 

 that in the wild state only go into oestrum once or 

 twice a year become fertile all the time in captivity. 



After bilateral removal of the ovaries the patient 

 is of course sterile and menstruation ceases, but in 

 a few rare cases, apparently owing to abnormal 

 outlying fragments of ovary remaining behind, 

 pregnancy has occurred and menstruation continued. 



By some mysterious chemical attraction, the shed 

 ovum finds its way into the Fallopian tube. If one 

 tube is blocked, the other may receive the ovum, 

 because cases are not very infrequent of a tubal 

 pregnancy on one side with the corpus luteum in the 

 opposite ovary. 



There appears to be in some families a hereditary 

 tendency at each ovulation to rupture several 

 Graafian follicles and shed out more than one ovum 

 at a time. A case was recently reported of a woman, 

 aged 35, who had two sets of quadruplets, three sets 

 of triplets, and five sets of twins. Her mother had 

 twenty-eight children, and her grandmother twenty- 

 nine, including quadruplets and triplets. In another 

 case a woman had four twin pregnancies, her mother 

 and aunt one each, and her grandmother two. 



