One of the oldest wonders a birth can hold is the newborn who opens its mouth and speaks, its first breath already a sentence. It is a small miracle of precocity, the infant arriving not as a helpless cry but as a voice with something to say.

Our shelf, honestly, does not yet hold that voice. The served witnesses gather instead around marvellous births that stop just short of speech. In the Mahābhārata (a Sanskrit epic composed across roughly 400 BCE to 400 CE), the war-god's nativity is told at length: the seed of Maheshvara, too fierce for even fire to burn, is cast into the Ganga and then onto the breast of the mountain Himavat, where six Krittikas find the child “lying on a clump of heath” and each cries “This child is mine, this child is mine”; the infant answers not in words but by “having assumed six mouths” to suckle all six mothers at once. It is a newborn who acts with a god's deliberation, yet never quite a newborn who talks. The Greek witnesses run parallel. In Apollodorus's Library (a mythography of the 1st–second century CE) the marvel of birth is Athena, who when the axe split the head of Zeus “fully armed, leaped up from the top of his head at the river Triton”—armed at birth, but silent. Elsewhere the same book records how Hephaestus was born and how Semele was delivered of Dionysus, births strange enough to earn their fame without a first word.

Thompson's apparatus knows the true instances are elsewhere. He filed authorities reaching from Buddhist story (the Jātaka) through Jewish and Irish tradition into West African tale, none of them wired to served text on this shelf today—so the actual speaking child waits unread while only its near-cousins, the armed and the six-mouthed, stand in the light.

If the child who speaks at birth belongs to so many far-apart peoples, what is it we want a newborn to say—that it knows us already, or that it will not be as helpless as it looks?