CHAPTER II.
PRENATAL ANOMALIES.
Extrauterine Pregnancy .-- In the consideration of prenatal anomalies, the first to be discussed will be those of extrauterine pregnancy.

This abnormalism has been known almost as long as there has been any real knowledge of obstetrics.

In the writings of Albucasis, during the eleventh century, extrauterine pregnancy is discussed, and later the works of N.Polinus and Cordseus, about the sixteenth century, speak of it; in the case of Cordseus the fetus was converted into a lithopedion and carried in the abdomen twenty-eight years.

Horstius in the sixteenth century relates the history of a woman who conceived for the third time in March, 1547, and in 1563 the remains of the fetus were still in the abdomen.
Israel Spach, in an extensive gynecologic work published in 1557, figures a lithopedion drawn in situ in the case of a woman with her belly laid open.

He dedicated to this calcified fetus, which he regarded as a reversion, the following curious epigram, in allusion to the classical myth that after the flood the world was repopulated by the two survivors, Deucalion and Pyrrha, who walked over the earth and cast stones behind them, which, on striking the ground, became people.
Roughly translated from the Latin, this epigram read as follows: "Deucalion cast stones behind him and thus fashioned our tender race from the hard marble.