4 ANTENATAL PATHOLOGY AND HYGIENE
and curious questionings of the folk-lore kind. Eather has it arisen out of a sea of books and monographs, out of a perfect ocean of literature. In this ocean, as may well be imagined, there is much that is of little worth ; nevertheless, the searcher will now and again bring up in his net something that is of prime import. In its abysmal depths are the teratological records of Chaldea (70),^ written in cuneiform character on the brick tablets of the great mound of Koyunjik near the Tigris, containing a long list of mon- strous infants, with the divinatory meaning of each one of them ; for teratoscopy had reached a high development in Babylonia, and the fall of a kingdom, the winning of a battle, and the occurrence of a famine, and much else, were foretold from the birth of a malformed foetus. Vanishing traces of the teratological occur- rences of primitive times among primitive peoples are also to be found in the deformed deities which the heathen ignorantly wor- ship, and in the folk-lore of many nations. Of all the valuable things rescued from the bibliographic sea of teratological literature, nothing is of just so much value as the part of Aristotle's works which deals with monstrosities, both human and of animals. In the " Generatio " and the " Historia Animalium " is displayed a knowledge of the meaning and cause of malformations such as was not equalled in later history till the times of the Saint- Hilaires, in the dawn of the nineteenth century. In the writings that have come down to us under the name of Hippocrates, there is not much that concerns monstrosities, but there are admirable descriptions of congenital dislocations, and disquisitions on morbid heredity, which cannot fail to interest the antenatal pathologist (83). These things, however, are all deep down in the ocean of literature, and it is not till we come near to the surface that there is again much of value to reward our search. From 300 B.C. to 1700 A.D., works on monstrosities (it is impossible to men- tion works on foetal disease and morbid predisposition, for they did not exist) have a value which is quite apart from the cases and specimens which are described in them ; they throw interesting side-lights upon the manners, customs, and beliefs of the times ; but as to scientific Teratology they are singularly dark. During these centuries deformed foetuses took their place alongside comets, earth- quakes, showers of frogs, mock suns, and the like; and were com- monly regarded as prodigies, or as warnings of impending evil, or as manifestations of the divine anger. From the beginning of the eighteenth century scientific works on monstrosities began to appear, and have continued to appear, until now one may easily gather together many hundreds of treatises, atlases, monographs, theses, and articles dealing with teratological subjects. In 1702, also, there appeared the first separate work treating of foetal diseases, as distinguished from monstrosities, the treatise namely of Diittel, entitled "De morbis fostuum in utero materno," and presented for the degree of medicine in the University of Halle, under the presidency of F.
1 The figures within parentheses refer to the bibliographical list of the author's published works.
