nection of his own.

All the above instances have been those of the effects of persistent
mental emotion. But it is also true that _violent and sudden emotion_ in
the mother leaves sometimes its impress upon the unborn infant, although
it may be quickly forgotten.

It is related on good authority that a lady, who during her pregnancy
was struck with the unpleasant view of leeches applied to a relative's
foot, gave birth to a child with the mark of a leech coiled up in the
act of suction on the intended spot.

Dr. Delacoux of Paris says that, in the month of January 1825, he was
called to attend a woman in the village of Batignoles, near Paris, who
the evening before had been delivered of a six months' foetus, horribly
deformed. The upper lip was in a confused mass with the jaw and the
gums, and the right leg was amputated at the middle, the stump having
the form of a cone. The mother of this being, who was a cook, one
morning, about the third month of her pregnancy, on entering the house
where she was employed, was seized with horror at the sight of a porter
with a hare-lip and an amputated leg.

At a meeting of the Society of Physicians at Berlin, in August 1868,
Herr Dupre stated that a woman saw, in the first weeks of her third
pregnancy, a boy with a hare-lip; and not only was the child she then
carried born with a frightful hare-lip, but also three children
subsequently. Another one, a woman in the fifth week of pregnancy, saw a
sheep wounded, and with its bowels protruding. She was greatly shocked,
and did not recover her composure for several days. She was delivered at
term of a child, in other respects well developed, but lacking the walls
of the abdomen.

Many remarkable instances have been collected of the power of
_imagination_ over the unborn offspring.

Ambrose Pare, the illustrious French surgeon of the sixteenth century,
in one of his treatises devotes a chapter to the subject of 'monsters
which take their cause and shape from imagination,' and was evidently a
strong believer in this influence.

A black child is generally believed to have been born to Marie Therese,
the wife of Louis XIV., in consequence of a little negro page in her
service having started from a hiding-place and stumbled over her dress
early in her pregnancy. This child was educated at the convent of Moret,
near Fontainebleau, where she took the veil, and where, till the shock
of the Revolution, her portrait was shown.

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