00 Ulysses
rarer form, with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case
known as the Childs Murder and rendered memorable by
the impassioned plea of Mr Advocate Bushe which secured
the acquittal of the wrongfully accused, the rights of pri-
mogeniture and king’s bounty touching twins and triplets,
miscarriages and infanticides, simulated or dissimulated,
the acardiac foetus in foetu and aprosopia due to a conges-
tion, the agnathia of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by
Mr Candidate Mulligan) in consequence of defective re-
union of the maxillary knobs along the medial line so that
(as he said) one ear could hear what the other spoke, the
benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolongation of
labour pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure
on the vein, the premature relentment of the amniotic flu-
id (as exemplified in the actual case) with consequent peril
of sepsis to the matrix, artificial insemination by means
of syringes, involution of the womb consequent upon the
menopause, the problem of the perpetration of the species
in the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that
distressing manner of delivery called by the Brandenbur-
ghers Sturzgeburt, the recorded instances of multiseminal,
twikindled and monstrous births conceived during the
catamenic period or of consanguineous parents—in a word
all the cases of human nativity which Aristotle has classified
in his masterpiece with chromolithographic illustrations.
The gravest problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine
were examined with as much animation as the most popu-
lar beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as the forbidding
to a gravid woman to step over a countrystile lest, by her