children with an average weight of 3,319 grammes, while those accustomed to less fatiguing work had children with an average weight of 3,318 grammes.  The difference between repose and non-repose is thus considerable, while it also enables robust women exercising a fatiguing occupation to catch up, though not to surpass, the frailer women exercising a less fatiguing occupation.  We see, too, that even in the comparatively unfatiguing occupations of milliners, etc., rest during pregnancy still remains important, and cannot safely be dispensed with.  “Society,” Letourneux concludes, “must guarantee rest to women not well off during a part of pregnancy.  It will be repaid the cost of doing so by the increased vigor of the children thus produced” (Letourneux, De l’Influence de la Profession de la Mere sur le Poids de l’Enfant, These de Paris, 1897).

Dr. Dweira-Bernson (Revue Pratique d’Obstetrique et de Pediatrie, 1903, p. 370), compared four groups of pregnant women (servants with light work, servants with heavy work, farm girls, dressmakers) who rested for three months before confinement with four groups similarly composed who took no rest before confinement.  In every group he found that the difference in the average weight of the child was markedly in favor of the women who rested, and it was notable that the greatest difference was found in the case of the farm girls who were probably the most robust and also the hardest worked.

The usual time of gestation ranges between 274 and 280 days (or 280 to 290 days from the last menstrual period), and occasionally a few days longer, though there is dispute as to the length of the extreme limit, which some authorities would extend to 300 days, or even to 320 days (Pinard, in Richet’s Dictionnaire de Physiologie, vol. vii, pp. 150-162; Taylor, Medical Jurisprudence, fifth edition, pp. 44, 98 et seq.; L.M.  Allen, “Prolonged Gestation,” American Journal Obstetrics, April, 1907).  It is possible, as Mueller suggested in 1898 in a These de Nancy, that civilization tends to shorten the period of gestation, and that in earlier ages it was longer than it is now.  Such a tendency to premature birth under the exciting nervous influences of civilization would thus correspond, as Bouchacourt has pointed out (La Grossesse, p. 113), to the similar effect of domestication in animals.  The robust countrywoman becomes transformed into the more graceful, but also more fragile, town woman who needs a degree of care and hygiene which the countrywoman with her more resistant nervous system can to some extent dispense with, although even she, as we see, suffers in the person of her child, and probably in her own person, from the effects of work during pregnancy.  The serious nature of this civilized tendency to premature birth—­of which lack of rest in pregnancy is, however, only one of several important causes—­is shown by the fact that Seropian (Frequence Comparee des Causes