A History of Monsters. 505

...of a calf or a goose, it can easily happen that an offspring is brought into the light bearing calf-like or goose-like feet.

Although we are well aware that such things can be attributed to monstrous parents or sometimes to illicit intercourse, maternal imagination nevertheless seems to play the primary role in this matter. We know of a respectable woman who, while pregnant, feared that because she had eaten a goose egg, some part of the goose might be imprinted on her fetus. Consequently, her child was born with the fingers of its hands joined by a certain membrane, much like the feet of a goose—though this was later carefully removed with the help of a surgeon. We shall likewise set aside another cause, namely the power of the Evil Demon, who can corrupt infants in the womb in various ways.

Furthermore, we will move past the cause of those monsters disfigured by an excess or deficiency of hands and fingers, since it has already been shown that these arise from an abundance or lack of matter. We shall instead turn our attention to those births where the offspring emerges defiled by the distortion of its limbs. For the most part, these monsters acquire their twisted form from the poor positioning of the mother's body.

This is a calamitous issue for pregnant women, as this fault distorts and twists not only the mother's body but also that of the child enclosed within the womb. Indeed, when the woman moves in any way, everything within her womb must necessarily move as well. Moreover, women who compress their bodies with undergarments, bandages, or tight clothing give birth to offspring that are bent backward, distorted, or hunchbacked, with slanted hands and feet, just as can be seen in the illustration provided above.

To these causes, we must add blows and falls from a height. These occurrences and similar injuries affecting a pregnant woman will inevitably impact and penetrate the offspring. As a result, the tender bones of the fetus are sometimes broken, twisted, dislocated, or corrupted by some other gross deformity. Beyond this, such violent accidents and heavy jarring can cause a ruptured vein throughout the body, leading to a hemorrhage. This, in turn, withdraws nourishment from the fetus, often resulting in an infant that is stunted, thin, and plainly monstrous.

CHAPTER V. On the Deformed Constitution of the Belly and Genitals.

It remains for us to proceed to a consideration of the deformed parts of the abdomen and genitals. Hesiod writes in *Melpomene* that Hercules once found a maiden of dual nature in a cave, for her parts below the navel ended in the form of a serpent, as was recounted in the *History of Serpents*. Later, in Thrace, shortly before the death of the Roman Emperor Maurice, a woman gave birth to a horrific monster that displayed the rudiments of a human form down to the navel, but the parts of the belly ended in a fish. By Maurice's command, it was killed, and the mother was cleared of blame since she had contributed nothing to this monstrosity, as we explained in the previous chapter following the opinion of Lycosthenes.

Here we should also recall that monster mentioned in the chapter on the two-headed, born in October 1598 between Augera and Tortona. Near its buttocks, it had a tail about five fingers long that covered the anal opening, much like what is observed in tailed quadrupeds. Also in Genoa, in the year 1555, a two-faced monster like Janus was born to a French woman living there, which we discussed earlier. But in addition to that deformity, its intestines protruded from its back, and near the lower part of the belly, its liver hung from its vulva