s accredited with publishing the following extract from the
history of a journey to Saragossa, Barcelona, and Valencia, in the year
1585, by Philip II of Spain. The book was written by Henrique Cock, who
accompanied Philip as his private secretary. On page 248 the following
statements are to be found: At the age of eleven years, Margarita
Goncalez, whose father was a Biscayian, and whose mother was French,
was married to her first husband, who was forty years old. By him she
had 78 boys and 7 girls. He died thirteen years after the marriage,
and, after having remained a widow two years, the woman married again.
By her second husband, Thomas Gchoa, she had 66 boys and 7 girls.
These children were all born in Valencia, between the fifteenth and
thirty-fifth year of the mother's age, and at the time when the account
was written she was thirty-five years old and pregnant again. Of the
children, 47 by the first husband and 52 by the second were baptized;
the other births were still or premature. There were 33 confinements in
all."

Extreme Prolificity by Single Births.--The number of children a woman
may bring forth is therefore not to be accurately stated; there seems
to be almost no limit to it, and even when we exclude those cases in
which remarkable multiplicity at each birth augments the number, there
are still some almost incredible cases on record. The statistics of the
St. Pancras Royal Dispensary, 1853, estimated the number of children
one woman may bear as from 25 to 69. Eisenmenger relates the history of
a case of a woman in the last century bearing 51 children, and there is
another case in which a woman bore 44 children, all boys. Atkinson
speaks of a lady married at sixteen, dying when she was sixty-four, who
had borne 39 children, all at single births, by one husband, whom she
survived. The children, 32 daughters and 7 sons, all attained their
majority. There was a case of a woman in America who in twenty-six
years gave birth to 22 children, all at single births. Thoresby in his
"History of Leeds," 1715, mentions three remarkable cases--one the wife
of Dr. Phineas Hudson, Chancellor of York, as having died in her
thirty-ninth year of her twenty-fourth child; another of Mrs. Joseph
Cooper, as dying of her twenty-sixth child, and, lastly, of Mrs.
William Greenhill, of a village in Hertford, England, who gave birth to
39 children during her life. Brand, a writer of great repute, in his
"History of Newcastle," qu