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594 2%, AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

harlequins playing about! But for the ignorance of our
fathers we might have been burnished like game cocks, and
had wives like birds of paradise, and daughters like cocka-
toos, Now and then those that love curiosities might have a
little monster, and for those who think two heads better
than one, it would be quite easy to frighten the mother out
of a child with two heads,

Let not the learned witness complain that we treat his
opinions lightly; the greatest philosophers in the universe
have been thonght, upor some particular subjects, too easy
of belief,

Hippocrates relates that his mother used frequently to
tell him that for two years before his birth she had no carnal
intercourse with his father. But that she had been strangely
influenced one evening as she was walking in the garden.

Galen, in his treatise on the measles, says the disease was
brought by a woman who had no father.

Deetor Harvey, who discovered the circulation of the blood
is said to have believed and written of a race of men with
tails.

Diodorus Sieulus mentions a sorceress of Egypt who had
passed for the celebrated Isis, upon the strength of bearing
children without the help of men, but that a priest of Mer-
eury was detected in her bed.

Livy speaks of a woman brought to bed in a desolate island,
where she had not seen a human face for nine years. She
was brought, he says, to Rome, and examined by the senate.
What a pity that we had no report taken in short hand of
the arguments of the jurisconsulta, and the opinions of the
eonseript fathers!

Lord Bacon, in treating of the period of gestation of va-
vious animals, says gravely, that an ox goes twelve months
with young; and Doctor Mitchill, of North America, was 80
impressed in early life by reading the novel of the Christian
pishop Helidorus, entitled the loves of Theagines and Chari-
clea, that he could not see any improbability in black men
getting white children.

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