Note 356 — Of Monsters and Hermaphrodites, legally considered.

It is scarcely necessary to guard the reader against a belief in the extraordinary instances of monstrosity which are to be found in the periodical collections published during the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, as in the Ephemerides, Journal des Sçavans, &c. In one, there is mention made of a child born with a pig’s head; in another a woman is delivered of an animal exactly like a pike fish!