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ALEXANDER WHISTELO. 589

that the Calipoedia,® or art of getting beautiful children, as
also of procreating males or females, may be taught by affect-
ing the imagination of the male parent; for he says that the
delicate extremities of the seminal glands irritate the organs
of sense, either of sight or of touch. He recommends the art
very seriously to those who are interested in the procreation
of male and female children; and observes that the phalit
which were hung round the necks of the Roman ladies, or
worn in their hair, might have caused the great proportion
of male children. He laments, finally, that the manner of
accomplishing this cannot be unfolded with sufficient delicacy
to meet the public eye. And I fear myself the squeamishness
of the age to be such, that if any professor should propose a
course of lectures, or any artist advertise to give lessona in
this art, he would find very great difficulty and discourage-
ment. A reflection, by-the-by, involving a satire upon man-
Kind, since it ia notorious that the most delicate of both sexes
practice, with shameless hypocrisy, what is too bad, it would
seem, to be spoken of without offending decency. I greatly
wish, therefore, that the Abbe Spallenzani had brought his
methods into general use, notwithstanding the slighting man-
ner in which Sir James Jay has treated them, because it
would be a means of quieting the most serupulous delicacy,
and relieving persons of elevated sentiment from the neces-
sity of coarse familiarities; and be more snitable every way
to the delicacy of the age. But as far as concerns the present
point, whether Réderer, Mitchill or Darwin prevail, the cause
is not a whit advanced; for allowing that this white man
operated upon the organs of sight or touch, whether of father
or mother, so as to whiten the child, such a position would
give birth to two doubts, more perplexing than any yet ap-
pearing. First, touching the identity and individuality of
the infant, of which individuality color is a part. For if one
makes a child black and another makes it white, shall it,
while it continues white, be said to be the child of the father

“Doetor Darwin, and other learned zoologists, seem to have mis-

taken this term. It should be written Callipaedopasia—The Re-
porter,

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