History of Monsters. 326

is used, although Niphus, in his *Commentaries*, asserts that portents do not belong to this category. For indeed, according to Aristotle’s opinion in the *Meteorology*, the word *phasma* properly applies to celestial monsters—namely portents and prodigies; nevertheless, some authors use this term for a monster as well. Elsewhere among the Greeks, *pelor* is interpreted as a monster, but rather one that exhibits a huge and immense mass, as if it were "near a mountain" in its size.

Therefore, Apollonius, in his *Argonautica*, sometimes used this term when naming Giants, although later the same author used the word elsewhere to indicate a monstrous birth.

Other Greeks referred to monsters as *apopholia*, a term signifying something monstrous and prodigious, yet it usually denotes something vain and useless. For this reason, those eggs of birds which are sterile are properly called *apopholia*, even though this term also encompasses degenerate offspring.

In Hebrew, as found in Deuteronomy, a monster is called *Mopeth*, from the word *Haphah* (to shine forth) or from the word *Pathah* (to persuade), because monsters and portents may call back to a better state of mind those people to whom they predict coming evils. In German, it is called *Ein wunderging* or *Ein unnatürlich*; in Spanish, *milagro*; in French, *monstre*; and in Italian, *mostro*.

CLASSIFICATIONS

The classifications of monsters are so difficult to understand that they might seem to require the interpretation of a Sibyl, especially since so many authors have brought forth so many different opinions in explaining them.

Aristotle, in his history of the generation of animals, reduced these to three main headings: the abundance or deficiency of parts, and the preposterous and perverse order of nature in their placement. Averroes, in his commentaries on the same passage of Aristotle, established four species of monstrous births, declaring that some differ in number, some in quantity, some in quality, and others in position.

Isidore first considers monsters of size and smallness of the body, thus including Giants and Dwarfs; next, regarding the size or smallness of limbs, he does not exclude offspring born with large or small parts.

Third, he looks at the excess or deficiency of parts, so as to include infants with three hands, or those born without hands or other such parts. Fourth, he considers monsters transformed in part, such as an offspring born with the head of a dog, or those transfigured into another nature entirely, such as a serpent born from a woman. Fifth, he contemplates the change in the position of parts, such as an eye in the breast or the liver in the left hypochondrium. Sixth, he marvels at the precocious creation of parts, such as an infant emerging from the womb with teeth, a beard, or grey hair.

Seventh, he brings into the arena the combination of several monstrous differences, which an offspring with the head of a lion and the feet of a calf might represent. Finally, eighth, he presents the mixing of genus or sex, a category constituted by hermaphrodites.

The most distinguished Septalius reduces human monsters to a three-fold genus, since anything occurring outside the intention and power of nature, and differing from the parents, happens in three ways.

First, regarding the substance of the act and what is created, which is the most significant; second, regarding the place in which it occurs, which is far less; and third, regarding the manner and order of its creation, which is even less extreme and less dissimilar. To the first genus, he refers those monsters which—either as a whole or in their parts—recede from the power of nature and from the likeness of their parents in their manner, their placement, and their very substance. These monsters occupy the highest degree because they never serve the purpose of a natural end; this occurs, for example, when in the human species, monsters bear the form of a beast, either in whole or in part. For nature would not only wish to make the parts of a beast in the manner in which they are made, but not even in