498 Ulisse Aldrovandi

Furthermore, Nature, when shaping the hands of fetuses, is sometimes hindered by various obstacles or prompted by other causes. While she may produce hands and feet with the correct and proper number of fingers, she occasionally produces them distorted or otherwise depraved. It is established in historical records that this occurred in Bologna on the last day of December in the year 1446. At the eighth hour of the night, an infant was born with an imperforate anus, teeth, and cleft lips, but with contorted hands and feet. Ambroise Paré provides an illustration of a monster with distorted hands and feet, just as it appears in Figure III.

This distortion of the hands brings to mind a hooked and monstrously depraved hand formed in the mother's womb due to an encounter with crayfish, a case which can be read in the fifth book of Johann Georg Schenck’s *Revised Observations*.

Moreover, last year—specifically in May 1640, while we were writing these very lines—a certain beggar named Antonio arrived in Bologna. He was twenty years old and born in the territory of Rimini. He had carried one heavily malformed hand from his mother's womb, while the other remained healthy. This was perhaps for a reason not much different from the one Levinus reported regarding a girl’s tuberous hand. In Antonio’s case, upon examining the hand, only three fingers had emerged as far as the second joint, and even those were twisted and diminished; the remaining joints of the fingers were felt by touch to be fused together beneath the skin of the swollen hand. Consequently, we saw to it that this hand was drawn from both the front and the back, so that the reader might weigh and marvel at what foul things Nature, when goaded by obstacles, can create in offspring. This monstrous hand is shown depicted from the front in Figure IV and from the back in Figure V.

Schenck also mentions a monstrous and horrific hand. A thirteen-year-old girl had a left hand that became monstrous, not from its first formation in the womb, but after her eighth year. It grew to such a size, dappled with whitish spots and so foul to look upon, that it resembled the likeness of a large toad. Furthermore, she seemed to have been born with this monstrous hand because it was soft to the touch and caused her no pain, as if it were underpinned by a sponge; the joints of the fingers were hardly visible because of the swelling. This hand always remained the same size and enormous shape, neither growing nor shrinking with any changes in the air or the phases of the moon. This was observed in the year 1555. Similarly, Julius Caesar Scaliger published in his *Exercitationes* that he had seen a matron who had one hand twice as large as the other.

It now remains for us to turn to the specific consideration of fingers. Indeed, the formative power in the mother's womb, when disturbed by encroaching causes, sometimes disfigures the hands with a scarcity of fingers. Johann Georg Schenck shows an illustration of a monstrous hand composed of only four fingers, the thumb of which displayed an unusual length and proportion. Beyond this, we previously mentioned a sixty-year-old man whose right hand was composed of only three fingers; nevertheless, he diligently performed the duties of an accountant in the house of a most generous gentleman. In our own time, specifically in the year 1614, there was a certain medical student from Trento living in Bologna who had only four fingers on each hand, and even those were poorly formed and twisted; yet, alongside other five-fingered students of medicine, he would record the words of the professor lecturing in public with a swift pen.

Ambroise Paré observed a monstrous nine-year-old boy with a reduced number of fingers in Paris in the year 1573. He was born in the village of Parpavilla, six miles from the town of Guise, the son of Pierre Renand and a mother named Marguerite. This boy had only two fingers on his left hand; the arm was not ungracefully formed as far as the elbow, but from there to the two fingers, it was greatly disfigured.

Furthermore, he lacked legs. From his left buttock, an imperfect foot-like shape emerged, distinguished by only four toes; and from the middle of the right buttock, two digits broke forth, one of which was remarkably similar to a male genital organ. The likeness of this lad appears in Figure VI.