BIMANA. 49 
cases of parturition there is but one of twins; more than the latter 
is extremely rare. The foetus, a month old, is generally about one 
inch in height; when two months, it is two inches and a half; when 
three, five inches; in the fifth month, it is six or seven inches; in the 
seventh, it is eleven inches; in the eighth, fourteen, and in the ninth, 
eighteen inches. Those which are born prior to the seventh month 
usually die. The first or milk teeth begin to appear in a few months, 
commencing with the incisors. ‘The number increases in two years 
to twenty, which, about the seventh year; are successively shed to 
make room for others. Of the twelve posterior molares which are 
permanent, there are four which make their appearance at four 
years and a half, and four at nine; the last four are frequently not 
cut until the twentieth year. The growth of the foetus is propor- 
tionably increased as it approaches the time of birth—that of the 
child, on the contrary, is always less and less. It has more than 
the fourth of its height when born; it attains the half of it at two 
years and a half, and the three-fourths at nine or ten years; its 
growth is completed about the eighteenth year. Man rarely ex- 
ceeds the height of six feet, and as rarely remains under five. Woman 
is usually some inches shorter. 
Puberty is announced by external symptoms, from the tenth to the 
twelfth year in girls, and from the twelfth to the sixteenth in boys; 
it arrives sooner in warm climates, and neither sex, (very rarely at 
least,) is productive before or after that manifestation. 
Scarcely has the body gained the full period of its growth in 
height, before it begins to increase in bulk; fat accumulates in the 
cellular tissue, the different vessels become gradually obstructed, the 
solids become rigid, and, after a life more or less long, more or less 
agitated, more or less painful, old age arrives with decrepitude, de- 
cay, and death. Man rarely lives beyond a hundred years, and most 
of the species, either from disease, accident, or old age, perish long 
before that term. 
The child needs the assistance of its mother much longer than her 
milk, from this it obtains an education both moral and physical, and 
a mutual attachment is created that is fervent and durable. The 
nearly equal number of the two sexes, the difficulty of supporting 
more than one wife, when wealth does not supply the want of power, 
all go to prove that monogamy is the mode of union most natu- 
ral to our species, and, as wherever this kind of tie exists, the father 
participates in the education of his offspring, the length of time re- 
quired for that education allows the birth of others—hence the na- 
tural permanence of the conjugal state. From the long period of 
infantile weakness springs domestic subordination, and the order of 
society in general, as the young people which compose the new 
Voy. LG 
