History of Monsters. 613

seemed to be hidden within. This man carried this mass around through various regions as a great spectacle, drawing crowds and admiration from people flocking from everywhere, and making a profit from it.

Similarly, in the year 1525, as Lycosthenes reported, in a village of the Hercynian forest not far from Kneibis, a monstrous male infant was born. From his body, near the chest, hung another human body, complete in all its parts except for the head, which seemed to be hidden inside the other body. This monster reached adulthood and, traveling here and there, collected money from curious onlookers observing this miracle of nature. Thus, it was seen in Strasbourg at the fairs around the feast day of St. John the Baptist in 1555. Indeed, Lycosthenes admits he saw this monster himself in Basel the following year, 1556.

This is perhaps the same monster described by Jacob Rueff in his work on human conception under the year 1529; since it reached mature age, as shown in figure V.

Paré also mentions a similar monster seen in Paris in the year 1530. Likewise, Cardano records a monstrous man of this form who was twenty-five years old. A certain Janus Vitalis of Palermo even sang of this monster in this manner:

An empty trunk hangs balanced beneath the chest, A boy emerges, and a nameless body leans Against his breast; it has a neck and head, Small arms serve for hands, and its back seems to face the sky.

Langius himself also recorded that in the year 1556, in the district of the city of Strasbourg, a poor woman, due to an abundance of seed, gave birth to a male from whose epigastrium hung a mass not unlike an infant, so that one infant seemed inserted into the other as far as the neck. Its legs and feet were perfect, but the hands were defective, as only four fingers were visible on the right and three on the left.

A similar two-bodied, one-headed monster was presented to the most celebrated anatomist Realdo Colombo in Padua for dissection. It was a six-month-old infant with another imperfect, headless infant joined to it. Since students of medicine desired to see whether the heart and other viscera were doubled, the cadaver was opened. In the imperfect boy, some intestines were found, from a portion of which a bladder and anus were formed, but no heart, no liver, and no brain were seen there. There was only a very large kidney, which perhaps performed the function of the liver; for from the extremity of the perfect infant’s liver, a thick vein, like an artery, reached that large kidney, and from there many other veins were distributed throughout the body.

Before we turn the conversation elsewhere, it will not be out of place to recite some verses that Pierius wrote to Pope Leo X about a similar monster; they are of this tenor:

It is clear enough that Nature and the immutable order of the world Do nothing in vain or without purpose. We do not marvel at works that are perfect, Nor is the use of them unknown to anyone; But those that seem pointlessly incomplete Are portents, and they serve mortals By revealing the hidden turns of events. Now we see monsters in Rome, which a Celtiberian Nurtured, though born on Gallic soil: A little boy, indeed, hanging from the navel Of another boy, his head driven through their shared Internal organs, nor can his head be touched anywhere. His shoulders and arms are useless in their slightness, So very short, and like a thumb