But far the greater part, after being driven into the sky again and again, is at length locked fast in bossy drifts, or in the wombs of glaciers, some of it to remain silent and rigid for centuries before it is finally melted and sent singing down the mountainsides to the sea.

Oh, how far more befitting would it have been had I never been born, or had I been carried from that luckless womb to my grave, or had I possessed a life not longer than that of the teeth sown by Cadmus, or had Atropos cut the thread of my existence at the very hour when it had begun!

As an explanation for the phenomena of hysteria in women, that benign mental disorder par excellence, they had the theory of a wandering about of the womb in the organism as a cause.

But he dissembled his fear within his heart and said unto him, 'What land, O stranger, dost thou claim to be thy country, and who of earth-born mortals bare thee of her womb out of due time[10]?

The gestation of the giantess had lasted for three centuries; it seemed like those enormous prehistoric animals who slept so long in their mother's womb before seeing the light.

"Dread tie, the common womb from which we sprang, Of wretched mother born and hapless sire.