gives these tints to the skin when it enters in too great quantities into the vessels. If these marks have the longings of the mother for their cause, why have they not the forms and colours as varied as the objects of her desires? What a curious assemblage of figures would be seen if all the whimsical desires of the mother were written on the skin of the child? As our sensations have no resemblance to the objects which cause them, it is impossible that desire, fear, horror, or any passion, or internal emotion, can produce real representations of those objects; and the child being in this respect as independant of the mother as the egg is of the hen, I should as soon believe that a hen, which saw the neck of a cock twisted, would hatch chickens with wry necks, as that, by the power of imagination, a woman, who happened to see a man broke upon the wheel, would bring forth a child with its limbs broken in the same manner. But even supposing this circumstance attested, I should still support the opinion, that the imagination of the mother had not been the cause, for what is the effect of horror? an internal motion, a convulsion in the body of the mother, which might shake, compress, and agitate the womb. What can result from this commotion? nothing similar to the cause, for if this commotion was very violent the foetus might be killed, wounded, or deformed in some of its parts; but how is it to be conceived that this commotion can produce any thing resembling the fancy of the mother in the foetus, unless we believe, with Harvey, that the matrix has the faculty of conceiving ideas, and realizing them on the foetus?