2.  The improbability of finding any living gossip who was present at the birth, must be obvious:  but I have conversed with old women who had heard their mothers describe the occurrence from personal knowledge.

3.  One ancient dame had no more doubt of the fact than the cause of it.  Having apparently heard and believed a monstrous tradition of a multitudinous gestation extant in common “folklore.”  “It was,” said she, with all gravity, “the effect of a wish,” intended to spite the father; who, having had two children by his wife, and an interval of nine years elapsing before the portentous pregnancy in question, did not desire, it seems, any further increase to his family.

4.  The parents died, the daughter married, and the “story of her birth” was forgotten:  until the publication of White’s Sheffield Directory in 1833, when, among other local memorabilia, the strange announcement of “ten children at birth,” was reproduced on the contemporary authority of the Leeds Mercury.  From that time Mrs. Platts has been more or less an object of curiosity.

5.  The Directory paragraph is as follows:—­

“An instance of extraordinary fecundity is recorded in the Leeds Mercury of 1781, which says that Ann [Sarah] Birch, of Sheffield, was, in that year, delivered of ten children!!! We, in our time, have heard of Sheffield ladies having three children at birth; but we know no other case, but that of the aforesaid Mrs. Birch, which countenances the fructiferous fame which they have obtained in some circles.”

I have been unsuccessful in an effort to collate the foregoing with the original newspaper paragraph:  but Mr. White, while he personally assured me of the veracity of the transcript, also pointed out to me an earlier version of the same fact from the same source in the Annals of the Clothing Districts, published about thirty years since.

6.  In conformity with the suggestion (NOTES AND QUERIES, Vol. ii., p. 459), I have examined the Parish Register of Baptisms, but the entry is as curt and formal as possible, viz.:—­

    “Sarah, Dr. of Thos. and Sarah Birch, Cutler,”

under the date, Dec. 12.1781.

Taking all the foregoing circumstances into account, there seems to me little ground for the erection of any strong objection to the alleged fact—­extraordinary as it is—­of ten children having been brought forth at one time; or, to the hardly less interesting coincidence, that one of them is still living.  I cannot but add, that if the contemporary notice of this extraordinary birth in the Leeds Mercury of 1781 should not be admitted as good evidence for the fact, it does, at least, negative the presumptive value of any objection {65} derived from the silence of the writer in the Philosophical Transactions six years afterwards; strange as such silence assuredly