Four months before the birth of her child a woman with four healthy children and no history of deformity in the family fell and cut her left wrist severely against a broken bowl; she had a great fright and shock. Her child, otherwise perfect, was born without left hand and wrist, the stump of arm terminating at lower end of radius and ulna. (G. Ainslie Johnston, Ambleside, _British Medical Journal_, April 18, 1903.) The belief in the reality of the transference of strong mental or physical impressions on the mother into physical changes in the child she is bearing is very ancient and widespread. Most writers on the subject begin with the book of Genesis and the astute device of Jacob in influencing the color of his lambs by mental impressions on his ewes. But the belief exists among even more primitive people than the early Hebrews, and in all parts of the world.[189] Among the Greeks there is a trace of the belief in Hippocrates, the first of the world's great physicians, while Soranus, the most famous of ancient gynæcologists, states the matter in the most precise manner, with instances in proof. The belief continued to persist unquestioned throughout the Middle Ages. The first author who denied the influence of maternal impressions altogether appears to have been the famous anatomist, Realdus Columbus, who was a professor at Padua, Pisa, and Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the same century, however, another and not less famous Neapolitan, Della Porta, for the first time formulated a definite theory of maternal impressions. A little later, early in the seventeenth century, a philosophic physician at Padua, Fortunatus Licetus, took up an intermediate position which still finds, perhaps reasonably, a great many adherents. He recognized that a very frequent cause of malformation in the child is to be found in morbid antenatal conditions, but at the same time was not prepared to deny absolutely and in every case the influence of maternal impression on such conditions. Malebranche, the Platonic philosopher, allowed the greatest extension to the power of the maternal imagination. In the eighteenth century, however, the new spirit of free inquiry, of radical criticism, and unfettered logic, led to a sceptical attitude toward this ancient belief then flourishing vigorously.[190] In 1727, a few years after Malebranche's death, James Blondel, a physician of extreme acuteness, who had been born in Paris, was educated at Leyden, and practiced in London, published the first methodical and thorough attack on the doctrine of maternal impressions, _The Strength of Imagination of Pregnant Women Examined_, and exercised his great ability in ridiculing it. Haller, Roederer, and Sömmering followed in the steps of Blondel, and were either sceptical or hostile to the ancient belief. Blumenbach, however, admitted the influence of maternal impressions. Erasmus Darwin, as well as Goethe