The workes of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey translated out of Latin and compared with the French. by Tho: Johnson. Whereunto are added three tractates our of Adrianus Spigelius of the veines, arteries, & nerves, with large figures. Also a table of the bookes and chapters.

CHAP. VIII. Of Monsters caused by the straitness of the womb.

* 1.1WE are constrained to confess by the event of things, that monsters are bred and caused by the straitness of the womb, for so apples growing upon the trees, if before they come to just ripeness, they be put into strait vessels, their growth is hindred. So some whelps which women take delight in, are hindred from any further growth by the littleness of the place in which they are kept. Who knows not that the plants growing in the earth, are hindred from a longer progress and propagation of their roots, by the opposition of a flint, or any other solid body, and therefore in such places are crooked, slender and weak, but on the other part, where they have free nourishment, to be strait and strong? for seeing that by the opinion of Naturalists, the place is the form of the thing placed; it is necessary that those things that are shut up in straiter spaces, prohibited of free motion, should be lessened, depraved, and lamed.

Empedocles and Diphilus acknowledged three causes of monstrous births: The too great or small matter of the feed; the corruption of the seed; and depravation of growth by the straitness or figure of the womb: which they thought the chiefest of all; because they

thought the cause was such in natural births, as in forming of metals and fusible things, of which statues being made, do less express the things they be made for, if the molds or forms into which the matter is poured, be rough, scabrous, too strait, or otherwise faulty.

Notes

• * 1.1

  That the straitness or littleness of the womb▪ may be the occasi∣on of monsters