ties. Malformed salmon and other fish can be
supplied in quantity, if anybody happens to want them. Now, what all I
have said is tending to is exactly this, namely, that just as the
celestial movements are regulated by fixed laws, just as bodily
monstrosities are produced according to rule, and with as good reason as
normal shapes, so obliquities of character are to be accounted for on
perfectly natural principles; they are just as capable of classification
as the bodily ones, and they all diverge from a certain average or middle
term which is the type of its kind. If life had been a little longer I
would have written a number of essays for which, as it is, I cannot
expect to have time. I have set down the titles of a hundred or more,
and I have often been tempted to publish these, for according to my idea,
the title of a book very often renders the rest of it unnecessary.
"Moral Teratology," for instance, which is marked No. 67 on my list of
"Essays Potential, not Actual," suggests sufficiently well what I should
be like to say in the pages it would preface. People hold up their hands
at a moral monster as if there was no reason for his existence but his
own choice. That was a fine specimen we read of in the papers a few
years ago, the Frenchman, it may be remembered, who used to waylay and
murder young women, and after appropriating their effects, bury their
bodies in a private cemetery he kept for that purpose. It is very
natural, and I do not say it is not very proper, to hang such eccentric
persons as this; but it is not clear whether his vagaries produce any
more sensation at Headquarters than the meek enterprises of the mildest
of city missionaries. For the study of Moral Teratology will teach you
that you do not get such a malformed character as that without a long
chain of causes to account for it; and if you only knew those causes, you
would know perfectly well what to expect.

You may feel pretty sure that our friend of the private cemetery was not
the child of pious and intelligent parents; that he was not nurtured by
the best of mothers, and educated by the most judicious teachers; and
that he did not come of a lineage long known and honored for its
intellectual and moral qualities. Suppose that one should go to the
worst quarter of the city and pick out the worst-looking child of the
worst couple he could find, and then train him up successively at the
School for Infant Rogues, the Academy for Young