t 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 toward self-consciousness, it was again the
same order of facts that was singled out by the attention. The very
names applied by the early anatomists to many structures so widely
separated from the organs of generation as were those of the brain,
give testimony of the state of mind that led to and dominated the
practice of dissection.

In the literature of the past centuries the predominance of the
interest in the curious is exemplified in the almost ludicrously
monotonous iteration of titles, in which the conspicuous words are
curiosa, rara, monstruosa, memorabilia, prodigiosa, selecta, exotica,
miraculi, lusibus naturae, occultis naturae, etc., etc. Even when
medical science became more strict, it was largely the curious and rare
that were thought worthy of chronicling, and not the establishment or
illustration of the common, or of general principles. With all his
sovereign sound sense, Ambrose Pare has loaded his book with references
to impossibly strange, and even mythologic cases.

In