The writer of this letter had hit upon the solution of the idiosyncracy which he describes, but had not perceived it. The man had been a dotterel.
“Have we not heard,” said the Doctor, “of persons who have ruminated? Do we not read well authenticated cases of some whose skins were tuberculated? Is it not recorded of Dioscorides, not the botanist but the Alexandrian physician of Cleopatra's time, that he was called Phacas because his body was covered with warts? And where was this so likely to have happened as in Egypt? He had been a crocodile. The cases are more frequent of people who in the scaliness of their skins have borne testimony of their piscine origin.”
Was not Margaret Griffith, wife of David Owen of Llan Gaduain in Montgomeryshire shown in London, because a crooked horn four inches long grew out of the middle of her forehead? “A miraculous and monstrous, but yet most true and certain account” of her, with her rude portrait affixed, was imprinted at London by Thomas Owen, in the year of the Spanish Armada, and sold by Edward White, at the little north door of St. Pauls Church at the Sign of the Gun. And in the British Museum there is not only the picture of another horned woman, Davies by name, who was born at Shotwick in Cheshire, but one of the horns also which she shed.
There was a Mistress Bomby, (not the Mother Bombie of the old play, but a person of our own times,) who having been a schoolmistress till the age of fifty, married at that age, and on the day of her marriage became deranged. She never recovered her reason, but she lived to be fourscore; and in the latter year of her life a crooked horn sprouted from the side of her forehead, and grew to the length of nearly six inches. Another made its appearance, but its growth was stopped. It is to be regretted that the person who recorded this did not say whether the second horn made its appearance on the other side of the forehead, so as to correspond with the former and form a pair.
Blumenbach had three human horns in his collection, all the growth of one woman. She had broken her head by a fall and the first of them grew from the wound; it continued growing for thirty years, till it was about ten inches long, then it dropped off; a second grew from its place, this was short thick and nearly straight, and she shed it in less time; the third was growing when she died, and the Professor had it cut from the corpse. The first was completely twisted like a ram's horn, was round and rough, of a brownish colour, and full half an inch in diameter at the roots. All three appeared to be hollow and were blunt and rounded at the termination. It has been said that all the cases of this kind which have been observed have been in women; the remark whether it were made by Blumenbach, or by the intelligent traveller who describes this part of his collection, would if it were true be unimportant, because of the paucity of cases that have been recorded: but there is a case of a male subject, and it is remarkable for the circumstances attending it.
Marshal Laverdin in the year 1599 was hunting in the province of Maine, when his attendants came in sight of a peasant who, instead of waiting to pay his obeisance to their master, fled from them. They pursued and overtook him; and as he did not uncover to salute the Marshal, they plucked off his cap, and discovered that he had a horn growing on his head. François Trouillu was this poor man's name, and he was then aged thirty-four years: the horn began to sprout when he was about seven years old; it was shaped almost like that of a ram, only the flutings were straight instead of spiral, and the end bowed inwards toward the cranium. The fore part of his head was bald, and his beard red and tufted, such as painters bestow upon Satyrs. He had retired to the woods hoping to escape exposure there, and there he wrought in the coal-pits. Marshal Laverdin took possession of him as he would of a wild beast, and sent him as a present to Henry IV; and that King, with even more inhumanity than the Marshal, bestowed him upon somebody who carried him about as a show. Mezeray, who relates this without any comment upon the abominable tyranny of the Marshal and the King, concludes the story by saying “the poor man took it so much to heart to be thus led about like a bear and exposed to the laughter and mockery of his fellow creatures, that he very soon died.”
Blumenbach says “it has been ascertained by chemical analysis that such horns have a greater affinity in their composition with the horns of the rhinoceros than of any other animal.” It may be so; but the short and straight horns were stunted in their growth; their natural tendency was to twist like a sheep's horn;—and the habit of cornification is more likely to have been formed nearer home than in the interior of Africa.
The first rope-dancer, or as Johnson would have called him ‘funambulist,’ the Doctor said, had been a monkey; the first fellow who threw a somerset, a tumbler pigeon.
The Oneirocrites, or Oneirologists, as they who pretended to lay down rules for the interpretation of dreams called themselves, say that if any one dreams he has the head of a horse on his shoulders instead of his own, it betokens poverty and servitude. The Doctor was of opinion that it presaged nothing, but that it bore a retrospective interpretation, being the confused reminiscence of a prior state.
Amateur thieves,—for there are persons who commit petty larcenies with no other motive than the pleasure of stealing,—he supposed to have been tame magpies or jackdaws. And in the vulgar appellation which is sometimes bestowed upon an odious woman, he thought that though there was not more meant than meets the ear, there was more truth conveyed than was intended.