The following account is given in New South Wales, obviously
embellished with apocryphal details by some facetious journalist:
The child, five weeks old, was born with hair two inches long all
over the body; his features were fiendish and his eyes shone like
beads beneath his shaggy brows. He had a tail 18 inches long,
horns from the skull, a full set of teeth, and claw-like hands;
he snapped like a dog and crawled on all fours, and refused the
natural sustenance of a normal child. The mother almost became an
imbecile after the birth of the monster. The country people about
Bomballa considered this devil-child a punishment for a rebuff
that the mother gave to a Jewish peddler selling
Crucifixion-pictures. Vexed by his persistence, she said she
would sooner have a devil in her house than his picture.
Lamprey has made a minute examination of the much-spoken-of
"Horned Men of Africa." He found that this anomaly was caused by
a congenital malformation and remarkable development of the
infraorbital ridge of the maxillary bone. He described several
cases, and through an interpreter found that they were
congenital, followed no history of traumatism, caused little
inconvenience, and were unassociated with disturbance of the
sense of smell.
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