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ART. I.-MONSTROSITIES. By SAMUEL HENRY DICKSON, M.D., L.L.D., Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, Pa.

In the July number of the "Cincinnati Medical Repertory," a description is given of "a female infant having four almost perfect legs," the same, doubtless, with the child described in the July number of the Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal, by Professors J. Jones and Paul F. Eve, of Nashville. There is, however, an obvious difference in their appreciation of the strange structure. Dr. Moores, in the first mentioned paper, evidently represents the baby as a unit, with supernumerary legs and duplicate perineal apparatus. Thus he writes: "The question naturally comes up, where is the anus and the vulva? The answer involves a description of a most wonderful freak of nature. Not between the abnormal legs, as would be presumed, but on each side of them."

The Nashville professors take a different view of the formation, and to my apprehension, clearly the correct

one; being "led to the belief that the lower portion of the spinal column is divided or cleft, and that there are two pelvic arches, that the pelvic organs are double-two uteri as well as two recti."

Of course, with two pelves, each having attached to it a pair of legs, it is to be expected that we shall find a vulva and anus between the legs of each distinct pair; and such is the fact. Above the umbilicus the girl is single; below the umbilicus double. If the old maxim be accepted "propter uterum solum mulier est quod est", we must, indeed, consider that there are two girls.

Monstrosities illustrate each other. I shall by and-bye give the details of an instance still living, in which the duplication exists above as well as below; the union or interfusion as far as the osseous structure is concerned, being very closely analogous, but the soft parts distributed otherwise. Several examples are on record of union more or less intimate, more or less extensive, but only by soft parts, as of the buttocks, shoulders, or as in the Siamese Twins, by a peculiar interposed ligamentous substance.

The interest which these subjects excite, for they are always interesting, is of a character greatly varied and diverse. On the one hand it attaches to it their embryological, histological and anatomical details. On the other, a still more curious and profound interest belongs to them, in their biological, social and moral relations, which indeed, have not hitherto received the attention they certainly deserve.

Let me explain. A child is born with supernumerary fingers or toes; a surplus arm or leg; or there is deficiency in this respect, an arm rounded at the wrist, an amputated limb; abortive fingers, as I have seen, projecting from the top of the shoulder. The Chinese Aki, whose history Livingston and J. K. Mitchell have given us,

had a miniature little brother growing out at his epigastrium, whose small body he had to carry and nurse all his life. Such cases may be simple, easily explained, readily arranged, or complicated almost unintelligibly.

Many years ago while traveling in the interior of Georgia, my carriage was stopped in the road by a man, who invited me to alight and visit his wagon, where I would see a strange sight, and might bestow much needed charity. I found there, sitting on the driver's seat and holding the reins, a person of good aspect, of average size of body and head and upper limbs, yet a poor cripple of singular combination of defect and deformity. Word painting is vastly inferior in conveying ideas of outline and shape to sketching, and indeed, is rarely successful. I will attempt, however, to give a description of what I saw and noted at the time.

Cornelius Allman is a native of Rowan county, North Carolina, æt. (then) 22 years; athletic as to his trunk and well developed in chest and shoulders; his hight, as he sat, was that of an ordinary adult, his countenance open, frank and intelligent.

His right hand, which he first showed me, is divided through the palm to the wrist, and consists of but two members, a finger and thumb, widely separated and forming a curve by their inner line of junction when opened, both broad, flat and misshapen, movable at the joints and capable of grasping firmly, as when he held the reins or whip in driving his team. Perhaps it would be better to say that the hand, the palm, was wantingthe finger and thumb being planted directly upon the wrist, which seemed normal.

The left hand had three members; two fingers alike and parallel, and a third finger or quasi thumb, not exactly parallel but not widely set off; all separate to the wrist; the thumb was broader and ill-shaped. He desired

me to observe that his left hand was not "forked" as the right was. Both were serviceable, and the member had the usual number of phalanges, and the nails were as usual.

The right thigh terminated abruptly, as if amputated and was shortened, as compared with the left. At the extremity it was broad and flattened, the outer condyle being enlarged and rounded; at the inner condyle there was an elongation or narrow projection carried forward or downward about an inch.

The left limb presented an extraordinary condition. The thigh was of natural appearance and proportion down to the knee, which was irregular and unsymmetrical in outline and shape. Appended to it hung dangling a leg and foot, which for length and size, might have belonged to a boy of eight or ten years of age; the leg dwindled rapidly from its junction at the knee, and was turned directly backwards, so that the toe of the little foot, which was neatly shod, was under the thigh, and the foot swung parallel with it. The shin was behind. and the calf in front, or what one might call the calf of this pendulous, flabby, useless member. Projecting downwards and separating from this quasi calf just below the knee, was a truncated or amputated fibula or something that might be a fibula covered with integument and left by the rapidly decreasing bulk of the little leg, with whose direction it was parallel. Its distinct projection was perhaps an inch and a half or two inches in length and bluntly rounded off.

We cannot express the pity we feel for such unfortu nates as are born thus mutilated and disabled and burdened for life. But the terrible evils which they are doomed to bear, however full of annoyance and discomfort, are, after all, exclusively or almost exclusively physical in character, material.

Contrast them with the unimaginable horrors which overshadow the existence of the second class of miserables of whom I have spoken. Contrast their sufferings, however great, with the reasonable anticipations of the future of the Tennessee infant, recently born, if it should unhappily survive and pass through childhood, adolescence, womanhood. Compare them even with the deplorable and most repulsive history of the past and present of the notorious Siamese Twins, whose prolonged life of public exhibition, has been a perpetual stain upon our modern mongrel civilization and pretentious refinement; whose double marriage, legally contracted, was an unheard of outrage upon common decency, contra bonos mores, and a standing affront to the respect for woman, without which, the very frame-work of society must fall to pieces and utterly perish. Let fancy loose one moment to form probable pictures of the inner life of these two human wretches, who chose to endure their hideous chain for the sake of lucre, and who have become rich, as it is said, by the exhibition of their disgraceful, because voluntary connection. Their sequestered individuality, never unrestrained; their thoughts perpetually liable to interuption; incessant crossing of volition; compromise of purpose and confusion of passion, feeling and sentiment. Dante has conceived no mode of torture in his Inferno worse than all this. Their neighbors say they quarrel vehemently, have been known to pass weeks without speaking to each other and disagree very often. about the money affairs, in which they are supremely absorbed.

The newspapers have a paragraph to the effect that they are about to take a voyage to Europe to be cut asunder at last. It ought to have been done long since, when they were born, when they left the breast, when they grew up to be boys. I saw them when they