Paulus Zacchias, physician to Pope Innocent X, declared that birth may be retarded to the tenth month, and sometimes to a longer period.

A case was decided in the Supreme Court of Friesland, a province in the northern part of the Netherlands, October, 1634, in which a child born three hundred and thirty-three days after the death of the husband was pronounced legitimate.

The Parliament of Paris was gallant enough to come to the rescue of a widow and save her reputation by declaring that a child born after a fourteen months' gestation was legitimate.

Bartholinus speaks of an unmarried woman of Leipzig who was delivered after a pregnancy of sixteen months.

The civil code of France provides that three hundred days shall constitute the longest period of the legitimacy of an infant; the Scottish law, three hundred days; and the Prussian law, three hundred and one days.
There are numerous cases recorded by the older writers.