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If the appearances in the poem of Peterborough, Whiston, Clarges, and Douglas indicate that Arbuthnot could be the author of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife," other facts about the poem—facts about its publication and about its satiric theme, strategy and style—are all consistent with his habits.

"His imagination was almost inexhaustible," remarked Lord Chesterfield, "and whatever subject he treated, or was consulted upon, he immediately overflowed with all it could possibly produce. It was at anybody's service, for as soon as he was exonerated he did not care what became of it; insomuch, that his sons, when young, have frequently made kites of his scattered papers of hints, which would have furnished good matter for folios."[42] The story of his sons and their kites, whatever its literal truth, epitomizes what is known about Arbuthnot's writing and publishing habits. Arbuthnot, Chesterfield went on to say, was not "in the least jealous of his fame as an author." He seems to have been so unconcerned whether or not he was credited with his own works that he let them pass for those of others and even foisted their authorship on friends as a kind of practical joke ("Dr. Arbuthnot is a strange creature," said Pope; "he goes out of town, and leaves his Bastards at other folks doors").[43] He often allowed his pieces to circulate in manuscript, not pressing them toward publication, and when they did come out in print, they were usually unrevised and published anonymously.[44] "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" shares all these characteristics: passed in manuscript (as evidenced by the Douglas copy), not published until four years after it was written, and then unrevised and anonymously.

Stylistically, too, "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" is similar to Arbuthnot's work. Typically, his satires are occasional, and structurally they are shaped by the event itself or by the free play of wit over the particular historical circumstances that have occasioned the satire. Arbuthnot's lack of structural control—or his lack of interest in asserting such control over his material—has been remarked on by almost all of his critics, who characterize the movement of his satires as digressive, desultory, and casual.[45] Even in The History of John Bull, where one would expect a structural coherence and unity because of its historical frame, its narrative line, and its allegorical method, Arbuthnot's idiosyncratic digressiveness has sent some scholars to the looser models of Menippean satire in an attempt to find a source of his style.[46] At his best, Arbuthnot is superficially similar to Swift: both work in a rapid, centrifugal movement, encompassing more and more targets; but, unlike Swift's satire, Arbuthnot's tends not to have that centripetal countermovement which creates a vertiginous sense of dove-tailing, giving the reader the impression that amidst the rapid proliferation of targets, they are all the same target, sharing common psychological aberrations or identical moral failings. Arbuthnot's targets seem just to proliferate. His mind, as one of his critics has observed, was "keenly alive to the next thing, but not to the unity of all things,"[47] and typically his satires are structured serially, drifting from satiric butt to satiric butt, one related to the other by little beyond the fact

that they all exemplify a highly generalized "foolishness." Such, too, is the movement of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife." As the alternative title to the poem, "Bunny's Dad," shows, there is no center or focus here. The poem is really a series of four discrete satiric portraits, one simply yielding to the next, building to no discernible structure or unity, each developing its own point or joke.

Finally, "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" reflects preoccupations that are central to Arbuthnot's works. Arbuthnot's overriding drive in almost all his non-satiric writing was to eschew the eccentric, the idiosyncratic, and the esoteric and search for simple, commonsensical principles of order or explanation. "The Reader must not be surpriz'd to find the most common and ordinary Facts taken notice of," he said, defending his methods; "many important Consequences may be drawn from the Observation of the most common Things."[48] In this pursuit of the quotidian explanation, Arbuthnot's impulse was to regularize the anomalous, to prefer the usual to the extraordinary, or to perceive the orderly in the aberrant, the explicable in the apparently wonderful and miraculous. In his first published work, Of the Laws of Chance, he showed how the seemingly incalculable vagaries of chance could be reduced to mathematical reasoning and subjected to orderly rules; in An Examination of Dr. Woodward's Account of the Deluge, he mocked system-making that relied on the evidence of the wonderful and miraculous, creating explanations "contrary to the Laws of Nature, and . . . the Philosophy of Second Causes"[49]; in "An Argument for Divine Providence, taken from the constant regularity observed in the Births of both Sexes," he demonstrated that an apparent statistical anomaly in birth rates was actually proof of an over-arching regularity in nature; in An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, he argued for the importance of mathematics on the grounds that it revealed the "simple and natural" laws that direct all physical phenomena, "applicable even to such things as seem to be governed by no rule."[50]

"There are two things common to all Mankind," Arbuthnot observed, "Air and Aliment,"[51] and it is utterly characteristic of him that the only two medical works he wrote were An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies and An Essay Concerning the Nature of Aliments. And it is utterly characteristic, too, that in these two works he rejected all esoteric explanations, finding the reasons for health and disease not in "occult or extraordinary" causes, but in the "Common Properties" of things we eat "daily by Pounds" or breathe "inwardly every Moment."[52] One can see gestures of this profound habit of mind even in his last work, Tables of Ancient Coins, Weights and Measures, where he attempted to systematize the chaos of Greek, Roman, Hebrew and other Near Eastern weights and measures by reducing them to an English standard of equivalents.

One reason for studying mathematics, Arbuthnot argued, was that it "frees [the mind] from prejudice, credulity, and superstition . . . by giving us a clear and extensive knowledge of the system of the world."[53] Given his

commitment to the idea of nature as an orderly process governed by simple laws, it is not surprising that in his satires he repeatedly attacked prejudice, credulity, and superstition and how they turned the mind away from the observation of the regularity of nature to a fascination with its putative miracles and anomalies. Credulity and superstition, according to Arbuthnot, were rooted in the mind's "incapacity to be moved or delighted with anything that is vulgar or common,"[54] and thus one of his favorite targets was the witless admiration of wonders, prodigies, and monsters. In works which he wrote with his fellow Scriblerians, those who seek wonders are marked for special ridicule: Whiston, of course, who builds elaborate cosmogonies from the single anomaly of a comet; Fossile, in Three Hours After Marriage, who proves himself a credulous fool in his enthusiasm for curiosities and monsters; Cornelius and Martin Scriblerus, both of whom are "in daily pursuit of the Curiosities of Nature," fascinated with its "grand Phænomena"—that is to say, with its oddities like earthquakes and monstrous births, not with its simple regularity.[55] In satires which Arbuthnot wrote himself, he also ridiculed the love of wonders, which he saw as springing from irrationality and ending in hysteria and social disruption. In The Art of Political Lying, he listed appeals to "the prodigious" as one of the best ways to manipulate a gullible public into heightened passion and political factionalism.[56] In The History of John Bull, he made the same point in the allegorical figure of "Discordia," who retails stories of "Blazing-Stars, Flying Dragons, and abundance of such Stuff," spreading "Tales and Stories from one to another, till she had set the whole Neighbourhood together by the Ears."[57] He consistently portrayed Whiston as beginning in mindless wonder at an oddity of nature and ending in a socially disruptive millenarian frenzy.

Arbuthnot satirized the attraction of the prodigious once more, this time by turning to a human monster, Lindamira-Indamora, in the Double Mistress episode of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. Arbuthnot had a major, perhaps the principal role in writing this episode; there exists a manuscript fragment in his hand, with corrections of Pope.[58] And certainly the episode plays out the themes that mark Arbuthnot's attitudes toward the prodigious: its appeal to irrationality (here, Martin's confusion of intellectual curiosity and sexual desire) and the resulting over-emotionalism and social discord (the battle among Martin, Mr. Randal, and the Black Prince and the legal, medical, and theological squabbles that follow).

Given Arbuthnot's temperament and his habitual sentiments, "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" easily could have come from his pen. The fact that an illiterate country woman had duped so many educated Londoners for so long with her tale of monstrous births obviously would appeal to a man confident of the regularity of nature and so alive to the absurdity of the wonderful and prodigious. Too, the near-hysteria of the reactions of the characters in "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife"—Clarges's anger, Whiston's millenarianism, Douglas's abandonment of his professional skepticism for unthinking enthusiasm—mirrors Arbuthnot's attitudes about the emotional effect of monsters, miracles,

and anomalies. And, perhaps most importantly, the author of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" has gravitated to those instances of the greatest social discord in the Mary Toft incident, when people were "set . . . together by the Ears," as Arbuthnot described the result of a credulous belief in prodigies: Whiston's apocalyptic predictions, the struggle between Clarges and Manningham and Douglas over how to proceed with exposing the fraud, and the day of 4 December when Douglas gave the impression that he sanctioned the monstrous births, thus setting off a chaotic and acrimonious debate.

Did Arbuthnot, then, write "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife"? The evidence is not conclusive. But Douglas attributed the poem to him, and he was in an excellent position to know if Arbuthnot had written it. The probable reference to Douglas in the first stanza and, to a lesser degree, the references to Clarges and Whiston in the fourth and fifth stanzas, suggest that the writer of the poem knew first-hand what happened in the bagnio or was privy to the stories that were making the rounds among the medical men. Arbuthnot visited the bagnio, and what he did not witness for himself he could have learned from his medical colleagues. The attack on Whiston's millenarianism and what appears to be the good-humored tweaking of Peterborough—both in terms that were common among the Scriblerians—also point to Arbuthnot. The facts about the publication of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife," its loose, serial style, and its satiric themes are all markedly similar to Arbuthnot's works. And the exquisite sense of the ludicrous in the poem is something that could have come from the pen of Arbuthnot—something, in fact, like what had come from his pen in the Double Mistress episode of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, where, too, a monster provokes learned and professional men into exposing their own foolishness. Until more evidence is brought forward, I think that we must take Douglas's attribution seriously and consider Arbuthnot's authorship of "The Rabbit-Man-Midwife" a strong possibility.