We read what travellers tell us about the King of Dahomey, or the Fejee
Island people, or the short and simple annals of the celebrities recorded
in the Newgate Calendar, and do not know just what to make of these
brothers and sisters of the race; but I do not suppose an intelligence
even as high as the angelic beings, to stop short there, would see
anything very peculiar or wonderful about them, except as everything is
wonderful and unlike everything else.
It is very curious to see how science, that is, looking at and arranging
the facts of a case with our own eyes and our own intelligence, without
minding what somebody else has said, or how some old majority vote went
in a pack of intriguing ecclesiastics,--I say it is very curious to see
how science is catching up with one superstition after another.
There is a recognized branch of science familiar to all those who know
anything of the studies relating to life, under the name of Teratology.
It deals with all sorts of monstrosities which are to be met with in
living beings, and more especially in animals. It is found that what
used to be called lusus naturae, or freaks of nature, are just as much
subject to laws as the naturally developed forms of living creatures.
The rustic looks at the Siamese twins, and thinks he is contemplating an
unheard-of anomaly; but there are plenty of cases like theirs in the
books of scholars, and though they are not quite so common as double
cherries, the mechanism of their formation is not a whit more mysterious
than that of the twinned fruits.
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