‘Did you hear the story of the extraordinary precocity of Mrs. Perkins’s baby that died last week?’ asked Mrs. Allgood. ‘It was only three months old, and lying at the point of death, when the grief-stricken mother asked the doctor if nothing could save it. “Absolutely nothing!” said the doctor. Then the infant looked up pitifully into its mother’s face and said—absolutely nothing!’

‘Impossible!’ insisted Mildred. ‘And only three months old!’

— Henry Ernest Dudeney, Amusements in Mathematics, 1917