hermaphrodite could be a witness to a
testament, the exclusive privilege of a man, and the sex was settled by
the predominance. If the male aspect and traits together with the
generative organs of man were most pronounced, then the individual
could call himself a man. "Hermaphroditus an ad testamentum adhiberi
possit qualitas sesus incalescentis ostendit."

There is a peculiar case on record in which the question of legal male
inheritance was not settled until the individual had lived as a female
for fifty-one years. This person was married when twenty-one, but
finding coitus impossible, separated after ten years, and though
dressing as a female had coitus with other women. She finally lived
with her brother, with whom she eventually came to blows. She
prosecuted him for assault, and the brother in return charged her with
seducing his wife. Examination ensued, and at this ripe age she was
declared to be a male.

The literature on hermaphroditism is so extensive that it is impossible
to select a proper representation of the interesting cases in this
limited space, and the reader is referred to the modern French works on
this subject, in which the material is exhaustive and the discussion
thoroughly scientific.

CHAPTER VI.

MINOR TERATA.

Ancient Ideas Relative to Minor Terata.--The ancients viewed with great
interest the minor structural anomalies of man, and held them to be
divine signs or warnings in much the same manner as they considered
more pronounced monstrosities. In a most interesting and instructive
article, Ballantyne quotes Ragozin in saying that the
Chaldeo-Babylonians, in addition to their other numerous subdivisions
of divination, drew presages and omens for good or evil from the
appearance of the liver, bowels, and viscera of animals offered for
sacrifice and opened for inspection, and from the natural defects or
monstrosities of babies or the young of animals. Ballantyne names this
latter subdivision of divination fetomancy or teratoscopy, and thus
renders a special chapter as to omens derived from monstrous births,
given by Lenormant:--

"The prognostics which the Chaldeans claimed to draw from monstrous
births in man and the animals are worthy of forming a class by
themselves, insomuch the more as it is the part of their divinatory
science with which, up to the present time, we are best acquainted. The
development that their astrology had given to 'genethliaque,' or the
art of horoscopes