* *

TEN CHILDREN AT A BIRTH.

The following circumstance, although perhaps hardly coming within the
ordinary scope of the "NOTES AND QUERIES," appears to me too curious to
allow a slight doubt to prevent the attempt to place it on permanent and
accessible record. Chancing, the other day, to overhear an ancient gossip
say that there was living in her neighbourhood a woman who was one of _ten_
children born at the same time, I laughed at her for her credulity,--as
well I might! As, however, she mentioned a name and place where I might
satisfy myself, I called the next day at a small greengrocer's shop in this
town, the mistress of which, a good-looking, respectable woman, aged
seventy, at once assured me that her mother, whose name was Birch, and came
from Derby, had been delivered of _ten children_; my informant having been
the only one that lived, "_the other nine_," she added, "_being in bottle
in the Museum in London_!" On mentioning the matter to a respectable
professional gentleman of this place, he said "he had a recollection of the
existence of a glass jar, which was alleged to contain some such
preparation, in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, as mentioned
when he was a pupil in London." Of the question, or the fact, of so
marvellous a gestation and survivorship in the history of human nature
should strike the editor of "NOTES AND QUERIES" as forcibly as his
correspondent, the former, should he publish this article, may perhaps be
kind enough to accompany it with the result of at least an inquiry, as to
whether or not the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons does contain
anything like corroborative evidence of so strange, and, if true, surely so
unprecedented a phenomenon.

N. D.

[We are enabled by the courtesy of Professor Owen to state that there
exists no corroboration of this remarkable statement in the Museum of
the College of Surgeons. The largest number at a birth, of which any
authentic record appears, is five, and the Museum contains, in case No.
3681, five children, of about five months, all females, which were born
at the same time. Three were still-born, two were born alive, and
survived their birth but a short time. The mother, Margaret Waddington,
aged twenty-one, was a poor woman of the township of Lower Darling,
near Blackburn in Lancashire. This remarkable birth took place on the
24th April, 1786, and was the subject of a co