3 1 3 
the uterine system in women , &?c. 
authors of veracity, and are recorded in the registers of the 
Great Lying-in Hospitals at Paris and Vienna. Within the 
last eighteen months, four cases have occurred within my 
own practice ; and I have at this moment in my possession, 
the preparation of two placentas, one of which was expelled 
several days before the membranes of the second were 
ruptured. In the case I have related, both the placentas and 
membranes came away separately, and at different periods ; 
proving still farther the soundness of the foregoing reasoning, 
giving a greater weight to the present observations, and 
explaining a number of cases in the ordinary process of 
generation, which have been brought forward as cases of 
superfetation. 
In one of the volumes of the Transactions of the Royal 
College of Physicians, is a paper entitled “ A case of super- 
fetation,” which merely goes to prove the occasional co- 
existence of separate ova in utero, and proves nothing 
farther. 
The Lad}^, whose prolific disposition is much descanted 
upon in that paper, and with whom twin cases were a com- 
mon occurrence, was delivered of a male child sometime 
in November, 1807, “ under circumstances very distressing 
to the parents, and on a bundle of straw and again in 
February, 1808, (that is, scarcely three months afterwards) 
of another male infant, “ completely formed !”— mark the 
expression, for it was not made use of in describing the 
first. The former died “ without any apparent cause,” when 
nine days old ; the other lived longer. Now, can we con- 
sider this otherwise than as a common case of twins, in 
