est cathedral nor from the humblest pulpit was the grand word Humanity ever uttered. To have shown mercy to an enemy would have been the super-miracle-more wondrous than the healing of the ear of Malchus. A vivid insight into the psychology of those days may be acquired by reading one of the most remarkable works in all literature - The Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, Written by Himself.

In the sixteenth century the Supernatural Spirits were a nuisance tho their frightened mortal contemporaries did not dare tell them so. But their fleshless arms interfered with all things, great and small. The sweetest cream they soured, the finest babies they gave the fits; they withheld the rain when it was needed, and they darkened earth and sky with eclipses; they whispered heresies into the ears of the devoutest priests, they stole into convents at night, lifted the blankets from the chastest beds, and made indecent proposals to the holy nuns, who have kindly filled volumes of sexual psychology with their erotic confessions. Bolted doors were of no avail, for unlike the humped camel, they could pass thru the eye of a needle. They were omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. And most mortals feared them, for not everyone could be a Luther and lambaste them with inkbottles.

Ambrose Paré was a superstitious man: he believed in astrology, spiritism, magic, witchcraft and the royal touch; he believed that devils sent diseases, and that saints cured them; he believed that at the command of General Joshua the celestial orbs stayed and changed their courses, that because of the prayer of Elijah it ceased to rain for three years and six months, that Jesus was born of a virgin without the aid of a male, and a host of other irrational and unscientific notions which were once accepted by the shrewdest of mankind, but are now happily relegated to the unused encephalic ganglia of the intellectually inferior.

In Paré's day, embryogenesis was little studied, and teratology as a science was unknown. Nevertheless mon

strosities, single and double, representing various degrees of congenital malformation, were known to exist, and an explanation was needed. What was the cause, they asked, of the birth of these abnormal beings - double-headed like Janus, one-eyed like Polyphemus, with webbed toes and fingers, with seven nipples, without limbs, with both sets of genitals, with three legs, with a cleft face, with the features of a pig or dog, with osseous junctions joining two monsters together? According to some, these monsters were the offsprings of women and the devil; according to others, they were the result of sodomy. Ambrose Paré did not favor the first view, and argues thus (I quote from the old English translation of 1634): 'It is much less credible that Divells can copulate with women, for they are of an absolute spiritous nature, but blood and flesh are necessary for the generation of man. What naturall reason can allow that the incorporeall Divells can love corporeall women? And how can we thinke that they can generate, who want the instruments of generation? How can they who neither eate nor drinke be said to swell with seed?' Paré, however, accepted the second explanation. Therefore,' wrote he, 'in times past there have been some who nothing fearing the Deity, neither Law nor themselves, that is their soule, have so abjected and prostrated themselves, that they have thought themselves nothing different from beasts: wherefore Atheists, Sodomites, Outlawes, forgetfull of their own excellency and divinity, and transformed by filthy lust, have not doubted to have filthy and abhominable copulation with beasts. This so great, so horrid a crime, for whose expiation all the fires in the world are not sufficient, though they, too maliciously crafty, have concealed, and the conscious beasts could not utter, yet the generated mis-shapen issue hath abundantly spoken and declared, by the unspeakable power of God, the revenger and punisher of such impious and horrible actions. For of this various and promiscuous confusion of seedes of different kinde, monsters have been generated and