ced by a vaginal examination. Evans believes that the
purpose of these contractions is to facilitate the circulation of
the blood through the large venous sinuses, the surcharging of
the relatively stagnant pools with effete blood producing the
irritation which leads to rhythmic contractions.

It is on the basis of the increased vascular and glandular activity and
the heightened nervous tension that the special psychic phenomena of
pregnancy develop. The best known, and perhaps the most characteristic of
these manifestations, is that known as "longings." By this term is meant
more or less irresistible desires for some special food or drink, which
may be digestible or indigestible, sometimes a substance which the woman
ordinarily likes, such as fruit, and occasionally one which, under
ordinary circumstances, she dislikes, as in one case known to me of a
young country woman who, when bearing her child, was always longing for
tobacco and never happy except when she could get a pipe to smoke,
although under ordinary circumstances, like other young women of her
class, she was without any desire to smoke. Occasionally the longings lead
to actions which are more unscrupulous than is common in the case of the
same person at other times; thus in one case known to me a young woman,
pregnant with her first child, insisted to her sister's horror on entering
a strawberry field and eating a quantity of fruit. These "longings" in
their extreme form may properly be considered as neurasthenic obsessions,
but in their simple and less pronounced forms they may well be normal and
healthy.

The old medical authors abound in narratives describing the
longings of pregnant women for natural and unnatural foods. This
affection was commonly called _pica_, sometimes _citra_ or
_malatia_. Schurig, whose works are a comprehensive treasure
house of ancient medical lore, devotes a long chapter (cap. II)
of his _Chylologia_, published in 1725, to pica as manifested
mainly, though not exclusively, in pregnant women. Some women, he
tells us, have been compelled to eat all sorts of earthy
substances, of which sand seems the most common, and one Italian
woman when pregnant ate several pounds of sand with much
satisfaction, following it up with a draught of her own urine.
Lime, mud, chalk, charcoal, cinders, pitch are also the desired
substances in other cases detailed. One pregnant woman