Monstrosities

The Mystery and Lore of Monsters. By C. J. S. Thompson, M.B.E. (Williams and Norgato. Its.)

A CATALOGUE of the sub-human monstrosities that have been reported from primitive times to the present day is not as astonishing in itself as it promises to be. What really is astonishing is that men either believed in the imaginary monsters, or had any part in creating the real ones. After reading Dr. Thompson's book one is left restive with questions. Out of what astonishing depths of terror, wonder and super- stition .did imagination produce its grotesque and legendary zoo of Gryphons; Cyclops, Gorgons, the multi-headed Gods of India, those men with eleven tongues, the three-headed Hecate, and-

" . . . Antbropophagi and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders !"

—those men with tails, whom travellers reported ? What was the state of man's mind when he could honestly report—

as did a correspondent in the Fugger letters--that "To-day in Vienna it rained blood" ? And how different are we who have believed in a personal Devil—a monster who is

strangely missing from Dr. Thompson's extraordinary col- lection—front these credulous men I Is science providing us now with a dwarf mythology of spirits, germs and bacteria which may scent as grotesque to future generations as the Gorgon does to us ?

And, turning from the imaginary to the real; what is our attitude to the obscene population of monsters which ap- parently grows up around us and which is preserved in patho-

logical museums, circuses and asylums ? Are we still "mightily pleased," as Pepys was, at the sight of a woman who has had a man's beard since the age of seven ? And what of the Suffolk boy with bristles like a hedgehog, the two-faced child of Taunton, the woman with two heads, one above the other, " very pleasant and merry in her behaviour " ; the male child with a bear growing on his back, " to the great admiration of all spectators," and innumerable other repellent monstrosities which hearsay or good evidence has recorded ? Do such creatures still appear now and—since the fair-booths do not absorb all--what happens to them ?

What causes their appearance ? Has science, in giving curiosity an object beyond self-indulgence, given us also pity ? And has knowledge, freeing us from the terror which in the sixteenth century regarded such creatures as portents of disaster, given us disgust ?

Dr. Thompson's book is mainly anecdotal in its treatment of these obscene innocents, and is made more curious by its wealth of naive but repulsive illustrations. His industry has been immense. But he suggests little by way of answer to our appalled questionings. So that one wonders what is the value of a compilation in which genuine and dubious eases stand side by side, mostly without comment ; and where credulity and conjecture have no corrective.

One is at first rather morbidly curious about such beings as the Siamese twins, but what one wants to know is, after all, not of the activities by which they obtained notoriety and a living, but how their minds were affected by their state. Perhaps very little for, the offspring of normal parents, many in turn produced normal children of their own. There are cases of conjoined twins of very different temperaments. Heads sharing the sante body arc reported to have led a dual mental life, talking, joking and quarreling together. Except that they made capital of their deformities, such creatures as the famous Israel, who had a small and horrible parasitic

twin attached to his body (he was exhibited in the Court of

Charles II), and Colloredo the Genoese, who was similarly affected, seem, according to hearsay, to have led fairly normal

lives. But did they ? In one strange case of a conjoined pair, though they shared the same blood circulation they were not subject simultaneously to the .sane fevers and fitness. Yet both felt the effects of medicine taken by one.

After these horrors the history of giants and dwarfs is less repellant and more interesting. There have been many authentic cases within living memory, and though popular imagination accorded to giants malevolent and brutal disposi- tions, the poor creatures have been on the whole docile, stupid

and modest. They have led as a rule the helpless lives of creatures on show, and most have been dogged by surgeons, (as O'Brien the Irish giant was), who were after the skeleton. One can think of nothing more pathetic than O'Brien's encounter with " Count " Boruwlaski, the celebrated Polish dwarf, who delighted the Courts of Europe with his cleverness, and who came just up to O'Brien's knee. Dwarfs are infinitely more intelligent and lively than giants. Many have had is remarkable taste for music ; a German one, Mathew Buckinger, who was twenty-nine inches high and was without hands, feet, legs or thighs, was not only able to write by the aid of two excrescences which grew out of his shoulders, but could play on various musical instruments.