370 Ulisse Aldrovandi

# The Horrific and Malignant Formation of Feet in Animal Fetuses

Nature has occasionally produced such forms of feet in living creatures that those who saw them were filled with dread. We shall deliberately pass over the child born in Saxony with inverted feet in the year 1525, as Lycosthenes reported, as well as the men mentioned by Saint Augustine who were said to have been born at Hippo with crescent-shaped soles and only two toes on each foot. Likewise, we will pass over in silence the small boy born in 1564 in the village of Papaulla, six miles from the town of Guisio, who lacked legs, but from whose right buttock grew two long toes, while from the left an imperfect foot emerged without a leg; his image is shown in the fourth chapter of this History. Indeed, we even omit the infant born in the Imperial City of Cologne, as Schenck records, on the second of May, 1597; this child was well-formed except that the thighs and feet were fused from the lower belly to the ends of the limbs, with the toes of the left foot entirely missing, replaced at the heel by a mass of flesh. These monstrous births are of almost no significance compared to those we are about to discuss.

If we turn then to the more horrific configurations of feet, we first encounter Textor, who tells of an ancient man named Marin whose upper body was human but whose lower part was equine, as he was said to have been born with horse legs. However, others claim he was thought to have equine legs only because he was the first of all men to ride a horse. Be that as it may, the production of animal legs and feet in human fetuses is not to be entirely dismissed. Indeed, Plutarch, following the thought of Aristotle, records a girl named Onoscelis born from a donkey; she had donkey legs, while the rest of her body was human, supposedly the result of the union of Aristonymus of Ephesus with that donkey. Furthermore, Peucer reports that during the reign of Michael Perpinaceus, a human fetus was born with the feet of a goat. Likewise, we have from Caelius Rhodiginus that at Sybaris, from the union of a shepherd and a she-goat, an infant emerged with goat legs.

Furthermore, in the year 1493, an unmarried girl gave birth to a human fetus with the legs and feet of a dog.

Cardano and Paré mention this monster, but Lycosthenes was the first of all to include it in his chronological work, as shown in Figure I. Magius reports a similar fetus born in Avignon in 1545 in his *Miscellanea*, with human upper parts and canine lower parts; because of this, King Francis of France ordered both the mother and the fetus to be burned.

Likewise, Volaterranus left written in his *Urban Commentaries* that during the time of Pope Pius III, a fetus not much different from those mentioned above was born in Tuscany from a woman who, as he puts it, had been violated by a dog; for this reason, she was brought before the Supreme Pontiff for the sake of expiation. Occasionally, monstrous births are also born with the feet of other animals. For instance, in Germany near the town of Landsberg, located on the borders of Switzerland by the Rhine river, Lycosthenes reports a boy born with goose feet in the year 1274.

We present here a hermaphroditic monster featuring the legs and feet of an eagle, though human in its other parts; because it could not be captured, it was perhaps struck with arrows