Examination
ensued, and at this ripe age she was declared to be a male.
The literature on hermaphroditism is so extensive that it is
impossible to select a proper representation of the interesting
cases in this limited space, and the reader is referred to the
modern French works on this subject, in which the material is
exhaustive and the discussion thoroughly scientific.
CHAPTER VI.
MINOR TERATA.
Ancient Ideas Relative to Minor Terata.--The ancients viewed with
great interest the minor structural anomalies of man, and held
them to be divine signs or warnings in much the same manner as
they considered more pronounced monstrosities. In a most
interesting and instructive article, Ballantyne quotes Ragozin in
saying that the Chaldeo-Babylonians, in addition to their other
numerous subdivisions of divination, drew presages and omens for
good or evil from the appearance of the liver, bowels, and
viscera of animals offered for sacrifice and opened for
inspection, and from the natural defects or monstrosities of
babies or the young of animals. Ballantyne names this latter
subdivision of divination fetomancy or teratoscopy, and thus
renders a special chapter as to omens derived from monstrous
births, given by Lenormant:--
"The prognostics which the Chaldeans claimed to draw from
monstrous births in man and the animals are worthy of forming a
class by themselves, insomuch the more as it is the part of their
divinatory science with which, up to the present time, we are
best acquainted.
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