There is no doubt that there are innumerable instances in which the imagination and all the moral and intellectual powers of women have been highly excited during pregnancy without their children having suffered in any respects ; and there are not wanting instances of chil dren being born with all kinds of deformity that have been attributed to the effect of imagination, without their being aware of any unusual impression having been made on their minds.
Again, it may be remarked that the stage of the period of pregnancy at which the injury of the child may take place is by no means de fined, and that there is 110 correspondence between the time or advancement of the flews and the nature of the injury. Some injuries are said to have occurred or to have had their foundation laid at the very moment of con ception, and even occasionally before that time, while others are inflicted only a few weeks be fore birth.
The monstrous appearances or malformations which constitute by far the greater part of the injuries attributed to the mother's imagination, are now no longer regarded as lusus nature merely, or " sports of nature's fancy," at they used to be called ; but the times at which many of them must have occurred are known with some degree of certainty, and these times by no means correspond with the periods at which the imagination is said to have been affected. Besides this, nearly the whole of congenital malformations have been accurately anatomised, and their structure is reduced to general laws as regular and determinate in each individual form as the more usual or so called natural structure. See Mossranserv.
In this question, as in others of a like kind, reference has been made to scriptural autho rity, in the history, viz. of Jacob s placing the peeled black and willow rods before the ewes which went to drink and afterwards conceived.
But any one who pays the slightest attention to the whole of this relation will at once be convinced that the sacred writer, in describing the proceeding of Jacob, exhibits merely that patriarch's belief in the efficacy of such means; for in a subsequent part of the chapter Jacob is undeceived by the angel, who appears to him in a dream and informs him of the real cause of the multiplication of the speckled lambs, &c. viz. the circumstance that the ring-strakcd, speckled, and spotted males had leaped upon the females, and that the progeny therefore merely inherited their colour Irma their fathers.
We now leave this unsatisfactory subject, upon which we have perhaps dwelt longer than it deserves. We have introduced the foregoing remarks partly in accordance with custom, and also with a view to shew how little connection exists between the facts of our subject and the vague fancies to which allusion has been made. In doing so we are aware that we are liable to the accusation, on the one hand, of having treated with too much levity facts and ob servations upon which some are disposed 11111 plieitly to rely, and, on the other, of trifling with science in noticing even such vain fancies as belong to pregnant women and their atten dant nurses.
We conclude by adopting and expressing the opinion of Dr. Blundell, " that it is con trary to experience, reason, and anatomy to believe that the strong attention of the mother's mind to a determinate object or event can cause a determinate or a specific impression upon the body of her child without any force or violence from without; and that it is equally improbable that, when the imagination is ope