and exceptional is of absorbing interest, and it is often through
the extraordinary that the philosopher gets the most searching
glimpses into the heart of the mystery of the ordinary. Truly it
has been said, facts are stranger than fiction. In monstrosities
and dermoid cysts, for example, we seem to catch forbidden sight
of the secret work-room of Nature, and drag out into the light
the evidences of her clumsiness, and proofs of her lapses of
skill,--evidences and proofs, moreover, that tell us much of the
methods and means used by the vital artisan of Life,--the loom,
and even the silent weaver at work upon the mysterious garment of
corporeality.

"La premiere chose qui s'offre a l' Homme quand il se regarde,
c'est son corps," says Pascal, and looking at the matter more
closely we find that it was the strange and mysterious things of
his body that occupied man's earliest as well as much of his
later attention. In the beginning, the organs and functions of
generation, the mysteries of sex, not the routine of digestion or
of locomotion, stimulated his curiosity, and in them he
recognized, as it were, an unseen hand reaching down into the
world of matter and the workings of bodily organization, and
reining them to impersonal service and far-off ends. All
ethnologists and students of primitive religion well know the
role that has been played in primitive society by the genetic
instincts. Among the older naturalists, such as Pliny and
Aristotle, and even in the older historians, whose scope included
natural as well as civil and political history, the atypic and
bizarre, and especially the aberrations of form or function of
the generative organs, caught the eye most quickly. Judging from
the records of early writers, when Medicine began to struggle