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392 Ulisse Aldrovandi

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Grammaticus, and many others, as well as several recent authors who deny it without any sound reason. Albertus Magnus, for instance, once proposed that there are certain regions in the heavens which, when the celestial bodies pass through them, render the matter within the womb ineffective, preventing the human form from being properly realized.

Manilius, sharing this view, expressed his thoughts in these lines:

Consequently, monsters are produced when specific constellations exert their influence upon our sublunary world. During Albertus’s time, it happened in a certain village that a cow gave birth to a calf with a human head. The local peasants were so astonished by this monstrosity that they brought the shepherd to trial, suspecting him of a foul crime and intending to burn him at the stake alongside the cow. However, Albertus was there to help the poor man; being an expert in astronomy, he testified that such a creature was not the result of human sin but was produced by the power of a specific alignment of stars, thereby saving the shepherd from a gruesome death. Elsewhere, Albertus further clarified this truth by noting a time when a constellation suited to the generation of swine was dominant, resulting in the birth of an infant with a pig’s head. This may also explain why human fetuses are occasionally born with elongated, dog-like faces. Furthermore, we can attribute to this same cause those figures found in certain stones that seem to mimic human or animal faces; as Albertus noted in his book on minerals, these are entirely the result of celestial influence.

In his commentaries on Aristotle’s *Problems*, Settala identifies a twofold efficient cause for monsters: primary and instrumental. He assigns the primary cause to the formative faculty inherent in the seed, while the instrumental cause lies in the primary qualities, aided by the imagination. To these he adds a supreme cause—namely, God, the Greatest and Best—or the power of an evil demon. Nor does he exclude the improper proportion of qualities mentioned earlier. Those who focus solely on the supreme cause, philosophizing more through God than through the wisdom of the pagans, maintain that nothing is truly accidental to the Great Architect. They argue that the divine mind always proceeds along a straight path toward a specific end, using instruments as means, and that nature—though prone to change—always obeys it.

Thus, although Nature may appear to deviate from its accustomed laws within the order of the lower world, it must be understood that it is driven by the force of the divine spirit. Relying on this logic, many scholars proclaim that monstrous births, by God’s permission, often precede or predict divine punishments, as we have explained in the section on Presages. On this subject, Dinothus recorded in his *Adversaria* that in the year Coriolanus was exiled, the city was terrified by many prodigies, including the birth of monstrous and barely believable human and animal offspring. Soon after, a terrible plague struck both people and livestock with devastating mortality. Ambroise Paré holds a similar view, writing that some monsters seem to possess a divine quality and do not arise from the general causes of monstrosity; these cannot be attributed to any specific physical cause, as they flow directly from the work of the Supreme Deity.

One must also not overlook the power of demons, which the celebrated Licetus categorized as the thirteenth cause of monsters. In the procreation of monsters, demons are capable of carrying the prolific seeds of various animals into a womb and foully mixing them. They can also bring together the various conditions necessary for such a generation by applying natural active forces to natural passive ones, while warding off anything that might hinder the process.

Regarding the aforementioned efficient cause, some also cite an instrumental cause which Albertus Magnus termed the "defect of the vessel." This concept was later elaborated upon by the regents of Paris in their inquiries into the second book of *Physics*