The annals of anatomy furnish many such instances; and the cases of the Siamese twins, and of the unfortunate sisters of Sgöny, are too well known to need description. But if all the instances on record were recapitulated, these blunders of nature are but as a grain of sand compared with the regularity of her productions through an infinity of ages.
The idea of individuals having a double sex, created probably by Plato in the fable of the Androgyne, the most ingenious fiction bequeathed to us by antiquity, was for ages supposed to have its foundation in fact; and every now and then, the irregularities of a Chevalier d’Eon revive the chimera, to which anatomists oppose a decided negative. The beautiful statue of the Florentine hermaphrodite at the Louvre is as much a chimerical being as a sphinx.
The Memoirs of the Chevalier d’Eon, published in America, declare one of the most illustrious dynasties of modern Europe to be his descendents; an assertion easily disproved by a comparison of the date of his visit to Russia with that of the birth of the Emperor Paul.
The Albinos were formerly considered a distinct race. They were sought in the olden time as favourite appendages to the Courts of African and Asiatic monarchs. Pliny places them in Albania, probably from the similitude of name; but does not state that they constituted a nation. His description of them, however, perfectly agrees with those of modern times; having white hair, and eyes which he describes as resembling those of a partridge. The Albinos are, in truth, an exceptional race; and their peculiarities are seldom found to be hereditary.
The morbid longings of women during pregnancy afford many remarkable facts. Goulard relates, that in the neighbourhood of Andernach, on the Rhine, a woman experienced such a longing for the flesh of her husband, that she murdered him, ate one half of the body and salted the other; when her appetite being appeased, she confessed the deed to two friends of her husband.
In the Helvetic Chronicles it is related, that in the time of Martin IV., an illustrious lady of Rome, an object of affection to the supreme head of the Church, gave birth to a son having the semblance of a wild beast; which monstrous production was ascribed to the passion of his Holiness for paintings of animals, numbers of which ornamented his palace, till the continual view of such objects influenced the mind and body of his fair inmate.
A black child is generally believed to have been born to Marie Thérèse, the wife of Louis XIV., in consequence of a little negro page in her service having started from a hiding-place, and stumbled over her dress early in her pregnancy. This child was educated at the Convent of Moret, near Fontainebleau, where she took the veil, and where, till the epoch of the Revolution, her portrait was shown.
Mallebranche has assigned the greatest scope of imagination to women under such circumstances. He mentions one, who having been present at the breaking of a criminal on the wheel, gave birth to a child whose limbs were broken at the exact places where those of the criminal were fractured. Scarcely an anatomical museum but contains monstrous productions. The question unsolved is the influence of the imagination of the mother in producing these aberrations of nature.