There was a cow in France,
in 1871, delivered of 5 calves.
CHAPTER V.
MAJOR TERATA.
Monstrosities have attracted notice from the earliest time, and
many of the ancient philosophers made references to them. In
mythology we read of Centaurs, impossible beings who had the body
and extremities of a beast; the Cyclops, possessed of one
enormous eye; or their parallels in Egyptian myths, the men with
pectoral eyes,--the creatures "whose heads do beneath their
shoulders grow;" and the Fauns, those sylvan deities whose lower
extremities bore resemblance to those of a goat. Monsters
possessed of two or more heads or double bodies are found in the
legends and fairy tales of every nation. Hippocrates, his
precursors, Empedocles and Democritus, and Pliny, Aristotle, and
Galen, have all described monsters, although in extravagant and
ridiculous language.
Ballantyne remarks that the occasional occurrence of double
monsters was a fact known to the Hippocratic school, and is
indicated by a passage in De morbis muliebribus, in which it is
said that labor is gravely interfered with when the infant is
dead or apoplectic or double. There is also a reference to
monochorionic twins (which are by modern teratologists regarded
as monstrosities) in the treatise De Superfoetatione, in which it
is stated that "a woman, pregnant with twins, gives birth to them
both at the same time, just as she has conceived them; the two
infants are in a single chorion.
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