9. From Rome this view passed over to mediaeval Europe, where under Christian influence the monster became a ‘sign’ sent by an angered deity as a warning and as a punishment for sins.
10. The pristine ignorance of the course of nature, leading to the assumption that conception could take place without sexual intercourse, had its natural outcome in the belief that women giving birth to monstrosities had intercourse—wilful or unknown to them—with demons as emissaries of the devil, or with the devil himself. This attitude served to maintain the belief in monsters down to the threshhold of modern science.
11. The Roman law of burning the monstrous birth or of throwing it into the sea was maintained for a long time and led also to the punishment of the woman who through supposed intercourse with a demon had given birth to a monster.
12. The view taken of monsters as a sign sent by an angered Deity had much to do with preventing the rise of a scientific theory to account for actual malformations of all kinds.
13. The rise of Teratology as a branch of medical science in the 19th century represents the closing chapter in the history of monsters, which is thus to be traced back to Babylonian-Assyrian birth-omens—one of the three chief branches of Babylonian-Assyrian divination that all made their way with the spread of the influence of Euphratean culture throughout Asia Minor and westwards to Greece and Rome, and that may also have passed to the distant East.
[Addendum, to page 43, Note 2.]
Porta, who in his Della Fisonomia dell’ Huomo (Venice edition, 1648, chapters XIII and XIV, or Latin edition De Humana Physiognomia, Frankfurt 1618, chapter IX) ascribes to Plato the opinion that a man who resembles an animal is likely to have the traits of that animal, appears to base this view on such a passage as Phaedo § 31, referred to in the note, and which is given as the reference in the German translation of Porta’s work. The passage, however, hardly admits of this interpretation, though it would appear from Porta, who evidently does not stand alone in his opinion, that from Plato’s view that according to the life led by a man his soul will be transferred into an animal having the traits manifested by the individual, the corollary was drawn that a man who resembles an animal has a soul which shows the traits of the animal which he resembles.