verily believed it was a child born in seven months, himself being many
miles distant from the mother of it when it was conceived. Upon which
the judges decreed that the child should be viewed by able physicians
and experienced women, and that they should make their report. They
having made diligent inquiry, all of them with one mind, concluded the
child, without discussing who was the father, was born within the space
of seven months, and that it was carried in the mother's womb but
twenty-seven weeks and some odd days; but if she should have gone full
nine months, the child's parts and limbs would have been more firm and
strong, and the structure of the body more compact; for the skin was
very loose, and the breast bone that defends the heart, and the gristles
that lay over the stomach, lay higher than naturally they should be,
not plain, but crooked and sharp, rigid or pointed, like those of a
young chicken hatched in the beginning of spring. And being a female, it
wanted nails upon the joints of the fingers; upon which, from the
masculous cartilaginous matter of the skin, nails that are very smooth
do come, and by degrees harden; she had, instead of nails, a thin skin
or film. As for her toes, there were no signs of nails upon them,
wanting the heat which was expanded to the fingers from the nearness of
the heart. All this was considered, and above all, one gentlewoman of
quality that assisted, affirming that she had been the mother of
nineteen children, and that divers of them had been born and lived at
seven months, though within the seventh month. For in such cases, the
revolution of the month ought to be observed, which perfects itself in
four bare weeks, or somewhat less than twenty-eight days; in which space
of the revolution, the blood being agitated by the force of the moon,
the courses of women flow from them; which being spent, and the matrix
cleansed from the menstruous blood which happens on the fourth day,
then, if a man on the seventh day lie with his wife, the copulation is
most natural, and then the conception is best: and the child thus