454 Ulisse Aldrovandi

presented, one dark eye was seen on the back of the head, and another clear, human eye was visible above the coronal suture, but without eyelids or eyelashes, which were replaced by the hair of the head.

But if we turn to those monsters said to be born without eyes, Pliny, first of all, relates that a man was once raised in Egypt without eyes on the front of his head; however, it is true that eyes were seen on the back of the head. This seems to have been done by nature because of weakness: since the woman, overcome by exhaustion, could not transmit the power of the eyes to the front of the head, as it is clear from anatomical inspection that the origin of the optic nerves resides in the back of the head.

Cornelius Gemma records a female infant completely lacking eyes and nostrils, as shown in illustration III. Similarly, according to the historian Lycosthenes, a boy was born in Hesse with well-formed limbs but a monstrous head, lacking eyes, nostrils, and ears; thus, only a mouth was visible on the face. Again, in Rimini, in the year 191 BC, a boy came into the world without eyes or a nose. Likewise, on May 10, 1514, a girl born to an unknown citizen of Bologna was brought to the Church of Saint Peter to be reborn through the Sacrament of Baptism; she lacked both a nose and its openings. Finally, Rufus adds an illustration of another girl born without eyes and nostrils, as shown in illustration IIII.

Just as Nature is sometimes deficient in forming eyes, as explained so far, she is conversely sometimes superfluous in creating them. Indeed, we find in the writings of Marcellinus that in the year AD 308, a boy distinguished by four eyes was born in Antioch, and similarly in Rome in the year 123, a boy possessing four eyes was born to a servant girl. Furthermore, Amatus Lusitanus confirms this with a monster born in Ancona. There, in the third month of pregnancy, a woman gave birth to a small body remarkable for having four eyes, with lips so deformed that it was a marvel to all who saw it. Indeed, in January 1514, the wife of Domenico de Malatendis, nicknamed "the Fourth," gave birth to a girl with two orifices in her face and four eyes; the Most Eminent Cardinal de Grassi, then Bishop of Bologna, purified her in the celestial bath and named her Maria, but she lived for only about four days.

Here we present a monster with three eyes, which we believe was born due to the impediment of ill-disposed matter, similar to the birth of other monsters. Although others report, following Lycosthenes in his *Chronological Appendix*, that these monsters with three eyes and four hands, large mouths and nostrils, and wide, round ears, dwell in certain parts of Arabia. In these places, the males are said to have breasts as large as women's, so that they can hardly cover them. They wear the skins of beasts, walk without shoes, and are said to have feet without toes; these types of monstrous men were commonly called Sterlochi. They are characterized by large mouths because they are voracious, eating half-cooked meat. Regarding these and similar beings, one should read the section on the differences of the head in the first book of this work, where figure V was to be placed.

Even when Nature produces only two eyes in forming offspring, she sometimes deforms them so that they resemble the eyes of beasts rather than humans, as observed in illustration VI. This was a monstrous girl born in Strasbourg, the noble capital of Alsace, with a wide mouth, an aquiline nose, and bulging, bull-like eyes, in the year 1544. At that time, according to Lycosthenes, the Emperor Charles V occupied Africa with his Spanish troops.

If we continue in recounting the foul deformities of the nose, we come across a certain monstrous and two-faced figure that is widely discussed. This figure bears a penis in place of a nose on each side of the face, with testicles in place of a chin, and at the end of the prodigious nose, twin eyes are seen; the sex of this monster was uncertain, but they say it was born before the King of France brought his troops into Italy in the last century.

A similar deformity was recently observed in Parma, in the monstrous birth of a wife