rs of alcohol. It took next to nothing to make a
panic; a child was born a few centuries ago with six teeth in its head,
and about that time the Turks began gaining great advantages over the
Christians. Of course there was an intimate connection between the
prodigy and the calamity. So said the wise men of that day.

--All these out-of-the-way cases are studied connectedly now, and are
found to obey very exact rules. With a little management one can even
manufacture living monstrosities. 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