was grieved in his time to see the lame and the deformed offering up spiritual sacrifices to God in religious houses.  And Keckerman, by way of inference, excludes all that are ill-shapen from this presbyterian function in the church.  And that which is of more force than all, God himself commanded Moses not to receive such to offer sacrifice among his people; and he also renders the reason Leviticus, xxii. 28, “Lest he pollute my sanctuaries.”  Because of the outward deformity, the body is often a sign of the pollution of the heart, as a curse laid on the child for the incontinency of its parents.  Yet it is not always so.  Let us therefore duly examine and search out the natural cause of their generation, which (according to the ancients who have dived into the secrets of nature) is either in the mother or in the agent, in the seed, or in the womb.

The matter may be in default two ways—­by defect or by excess:  by defect, when the child has only one arm; by excess, when it has four hands or two heads.  Some monsters are begotten by a woman’s unnatural lying with beasts; as in the year 1603, there was a monster begotten by a woman’s generating with a dog; which from the navel upwards had the perfect resemblance of its mother:  but from its navel downwards it resembled a dog.

[Illustration]

The agent or womb may be in fault three ways; firstly, the formative faculty, which may be too strong or too weak, by which is procured a depraved figure; secondly, to the instrument or place of conception, the evil confirmation or the disposition whereof will cause a monstrous birth; thirdly, in the imaginative power at the time of conception; which is of such a force that it stamps the character of the thing imagined on the child.  Thus the children of an adulteress may be like her husband, though begotten by another man, which is caused through the force of imagination that the woman has of her own husband at the act of coition.  And I have heard of a woman, who, at the time of conception, beholding the picture of a blackamoor, conceived and brought forth an Ethiopian.  I will not trouble you with more human testimonies, but conclude with a stronger warrant.  We read (Gen. xxx. 31) how Jacob having agreed with Laban to have all the spotted sheep for keeping his flock to augment his wages, took hazel rods and peeled white streaks on them, and laid them before the sheep when they came to drink, which coupling together there, whilst they beheld the rods, conceived and brought forth young.

[Illustration: 
    “Where children thus are born with hairy coats
    Heaven’s wrath unto the kingdom it denotes”]

Another monster representing a hairy child.  It was all covered with hair like a beast.  That which made it more frightful was, that its navel was in the place where its nose should stand, and its eyes placed where the mouth should have been, and its mouth placed in the chin.  It was of the male kind, and was born in France, in the year 1597, at a town called Arles in Provence, and lived a few days, frightening all that beheld it.  It was looked upon as a forerunner of desolations which soon after happened to that kingdom, in which men to each other were more like brutes than human creatures.