From the appearance of the
treatise by Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, teratology has made enormous
strides, and is to-day well on the road to becoming a science.
Hand in hand with embryology it has been the subject of much
investigation in this century, and to enumerate the workers of
the present day who have helped to bring about scientific
progress would be a task of many pages. Even in the artificial
production of monsters much has been done, and a glance at the
work of Dareste well repays the trouble. Essays on teratogenesis,
with reference to batrachians, have been offered by Lombardini;
and by Lereboullet and Knoch with reference to fishes. Foll and
Warynski have reported their success in obtaining visceral
inversion, and even this branch of the subject promises to become
scientific.
Terata are seen in the lower animals and always excite interest.
Pare gives the history of a sheep with three heads, born in 1577;
the central head was larger than the other two, as shown in the
accompanying illustration. Many of the Museums of Natural History
contain evidences of animal terata. At Hallae is a two-headed
mouse; the Conant Museum in Maine contains the skeleton of an
adult sheep with two heads; there was an account of a two-headed
pigeon published in France in 1734; Leidy found a two-headed
snake in a field near Philadelphia; Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and
Conant both found similar creatures, and there is one in the
Museum at Harvard; Wyman saw a living double-headed snake in the
Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1853, and many parallel instances
are on record.
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