524 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO ITOQ. 



such conceptions, mentions two large molas found without the matrix of a 

 woman. 



About 10 years afterward a much more extraordinary instance happened at 

 Paris, which puzzled the philosophers to apprehend, or believe. It comes very 

 well attested by Mr. Bayle, who first published an account of it in the Journal des 

 Sqavans, A. D. 1678. Soon after M. Blegny did the same in a particular tract 

 with figures, which I have by me : and afterwards Mr. Oldenburgh put an extract 

 of it into the Phil. Trans. N° ISQ.* A woman, A. D. l652, came to her full 

 time of bearing ; but though she had all the symptoms usual at that season, 

 no child came : she continued in that condition 20 years, still feeling the child 

 within her ; but from that time she felt no motion it had. In June 1708 she 

 died, and the next day was opened ; \Ahen there was found in her belly, with- 

 out the womb, a dead child, wrapped up in the omentum : it weighed 8lb. 



Before either of these appeared in France, there happened one in Holland to 

 H. Rhoonhuys. A woman with child, at her full time, was 4 days in labour, 

 and could not be delivered. M. Rhoonhuys being called, Dec. l658, found 

 the internum osculum uteri close shut, without flooding, or other fore-runners 

 of delivery. Finding the common passage so closely shut up, and a very pain- 

 ful tumour above the navel, he proposed the Caesarean section : but he delayed 

 it till the woman was past recovery. On opening the belly after death, he 

 found a child among the intestines ; and the placenta fastened to the colon, and 

 part of it to the fundus uteri ; and that there was a breach in the womb, large 

 enough for the infant to pass through it into the belly ; and that wound he 

 thinks was caused by a blow, though it hurt not the external parts, nor made 

 any impression on the tender embryo. I cannot approve, nor will I censure the 

 many things in his report liable to exception. I presume he mistook, the ex- 

 tended tuba for a matrix, as Vassal did. 



T. Bartholin met such an extraneous foetus wrapped up in a mola, which he 

 found in the belly of a woman : and thus conjectures, that it was first conceived 

 in the tuba uteri : vide the 92d Observation of his 6th Century. 



In the city of Orange, A. D. 1662, D. Baldwin, and Mr. Delafort found 

 a fine male foetus without the uterus. The report of this discovery is published 

 by Sachs, with very learned remarks, in Miscell. Cur. Vol. I. Obs. 110; which 

 he concludes with one more extraordinary than all I have cited, which he had 

 from the Silesia Chronicle, written long since by N. Polinus, as follows : A. D. 

 1581, a woman that had borne 10 children in 15 years, conceived again, and at 



* Vol. II. p. 435, of these Abridgments. 



