there are marks of nails, or points of fingers, or excoriation of the skin. The breadth of the mark, also, and whether or not it makes a complete circle, with the ends exactly meeting, and without deviating from this circle, should be carefully noticed; the latter circumstances conjoined cannot arise from a natural twisting of the navel string. The livid part should be carefully dissected, in order to ascertain if there are ruptured blood-vessels corresponding to it, whether the trachea or larynx be flattened, or their cartilaginous rings laterally compressed; for it is asserted that such injuries never can occur from the natural twisting of the navel string. The practitioner will be enabled by the foregoing remarks to appreciate the value of that indication, upon which the vulgar have ever laid much stress,—the swollen and red appearance of the countenance. Dr. Hunter has made the following judicious observation upon the phenomenon: "when the child's head or face looks swollen, and very red or black, the vulgar, because hanged people look so, are apt to conclude that it must have been strangled. But those who are in the practice of midwifery know that nothing is more common in natural births; and that the swelling and deep colour disappear gradually, if the child lives but a few days. This appearance is particularly observable in those cases where the navel-string happens to gird the child's neck, and where its head happens to be born some time before its body."
A woman suffering labour alone may have the fœtus escape from her, and fall to the ground, on its head, and be thus killed; or she may unexpectedly be seized with pains in situations at once destructive to the child. In the case of infants being found in privies, this circumstance ought not to escape our remem-
