Now all other animals bring the time of pregnancy to an end in a
uniform way; in other words, one single term of pregnancy is defined
for each of them. But in the case of mankind alone of all animals
the times are diverse; for pregnancy may be of seven months' duration,
or of eight months or of nine, and still more commonly of ten
months, while some few women go even into the eleventh month.
Children that come into the world before seven months can
under no circumstances survive. The seven-months' children are the
earliest that are capable of life, and most of them are weakly-for
which reason, by the way, it is customary to swaddle them in wool,-and
many of them are born with some of the orifices of the body
imperforate, for instance the ears or the nostrils. But as they get
bigger they become more perfectly developed, and many of them grow up.
In Egypt, and in some other places where the women are
fruitful and are wont to bear and bring forth many children without
difficulty, and where the children when born are capable of living
even if they be born subject to deformity, in these places the
eight-months' children live and are brought up, but in Greece it is
only a few of them that survive while most perish.
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