68 BIOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 



about the fourteenth to the fiftieth year, 

 though the fact that pregnancy may occur as 

 early as the seventh year shows that occasion- 

 ally puberty begins very early. As a rule only 

 a single egg cell is discharged from the ovary 

 at each period of ovulation, but, as the con- 

 dition of multiple births shows, there may pos- 

 sibly be as many as seven eggs freed at once. 

 Quintuplets have occurred often enough to 

 place this number beyond doubt, and there 

 have been apparently a few good cases of sex- 

 tuplets. An instance of seven at a birth is 

 said to be recorded in Hameln-an-der-Weser, 

 in Germany, on a memorial tablet of the year 

 1600, and this, so far as I can ascertain, is the 

 largest well-authenticated number of children 

 delivered at a birth, for the case of eight re- 

 ported in 1872 from Trumbull County, Ohio, 

 seems on good authority to be spurious. Al- 

 though, as we shall see presently, there is good 

 reason to believe that some eggs divide in a 

 way to give rise to more than one child, it is 

 likewise well established that many multiple 

 births are due to the liberation of several eggs; 

 how many as a maximum cannot be stated, 

 but from the cases just quoted it is not neces- 

 sary to assume more than seven. In such in- 



