are adumbrated thereby (most sublimely expressed, Psalm cxxxix.: "I will
praise Thee, O Lord, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.")

Physicians have remarked four different times at which a man is framed
and perfected in the womb; the first after coition, being perfectly
formed in the week if no flux happens, which sometimes falls out
through the slipperiness of the head of the matrix, that slips over like
a rosebud that opens suddenly. The second time of forming is assigned
when nature makes manifest mutation in the conception, so that all the
substance seems congealed, flesh and blood, and happens twelve or
fourteen days after copulation. And though this fleshy mass abounds with
inflamed blood, yet it remains undistinguishable, without form, and may
be called an embryo, and compared to seed sown in the ground, which,
through heat and moisture, grows by degrees to a perfect form in plant
or grain. The third time assigned to make up this fabric is when the
principal parts show themselves plain; as the heart, whence proceed the
arteries, the brain, from which the nerves, like small threads, run
through the whole body; and the liver, which divides the chyle from the
blood, brought to it by the vena porta. The two first are fountains of
life, that nourish every part of the body, in framing which the faculty
of the womb is bruised, from the conception of the eighth day of the
first month. The fourth, and last, about the thirtieth day, the outward
parts are seen nicely wrought, distinguished by joints, from which time
it is no longer an embryo, but a perfect child.

Most males are perfect by the thirtieth day, but females seldom before
the forty-second or forty-fifth day, because the heat of the womb is
greater in producing the male than the female. And, for the same reason,
a woman going with a male child quickens in three months, but going with
a female, rarely under four, at which time its hair and nails come