Thinking people are not going to be scared out of explaining or at least trying to explain things by the shrieks of persons whose beliefs are disturbed thereby.  Comets were portents to Increase Mather, President of Harvard College; “preachers of Divine wrath, heralds and messengers of evil tidings to the world.”  It is not so very long since Professor Winthrop was teaching at the same institution.  I can remember two of his boys very well, old boys, it is true, they were, and one of them wore a three-cornered cocked hat; but the father of these boys, whom, as I say, I can remember, had to defend himself against the minister of the Old South Church for the impiety of trying to account for earthquakes on natural principles.  And his ancestor, Governor Winthrop, would probably have shaken his head over his descendant’s dangerous audacity, if one may judge by the solemn way in which he mentions poor Mrs. Hutchinson’s unpleasant experience, which so grievously disappointed her maternal expectations.  But people used always to be terribly frightened by those irregular vital products which we now call “interesting specimens” and carefully preserve in jars of alcohol.  It took next to nothing to make a panic; a child was born a few centuries ago with six teeth in its head, and about that time the Turks began gaining great advantages over the Christians.  Of course there was an intimate connection between the prodigy and the calamity.  So said the wise men of that day.

—­All these out-of-the-way cases are studied connectedly now, and are found to obey very exact rules.  With a little management one can even manufacture living monstrosities.  Malformed salmon and other fish can be supplied in quantity, if anybody happens to want them.  Now, what all I have said is tending to is exactly this, namely, that just as the celestial movements are regulated by fixed laws, just as bodily monstrosities are produced according to rule, and with as good reason as normal shapes, so obliquities of character are to be accounted for on perfectly natural principles; they are just as capable of classification as the bodily ones, and they all diverge from a certain average or middle term which is the type of its kind.  If life had been a little longer I would have written a number of essays for which, as it is, I cannot expect to have time.  I have set down the titles of a hundred or more, and I have often been tempted to publish these, for according to my idea, the title of a book very often renders the rest of it unnecessary.  “Moral Teratology,” for instance, which is marked No. 67 on my list of “Essays Potential, not Actual,” suggests sufficiently well what I should be like to say in the pages it would preface.  People hold up their hands at a moral monster as if there was no reason for his existence but his own choice.  That was a fine specimen we read of in the papers a few years ago, the Frenchman, it may be remembered, who used to waylay and murder young