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,