Thaumaturgia; Or, Elucidations of the MarvellousOxonian
Religion
Thaumaturgia; Or, Elucidations of the Marvellous
Oxonian
Occultism
There are representations of curiosities, which we shall give an account
of from the Ephemerides of the Curious. It is customary to see at
Batavia, in the island of Java, the figure of serpents impressed on the
shells of eggs, Andrew Cleyerus, a naturalist of considerable note,
says, that when he was at Batavia in 1679, he had seen himself, on the
14th of September, an egg newly laid by a hen, of the ordinary size, but
representing very exactly, towards the summit of the other part of the
shell, the figure of a serpent and all its parts, not only the
lineaments of the serpent were marked on the surface, but the three
dimensions of the body were as sensible as if they had been engraved by
an able sculptor, or impressed on wax, plaister or some other like
matter. One could see very plainly the head, ears, and a cloven tongue
starting out of the throat; the eyes were sparkling and resplendent, and
represented so perfectly the interior and exterior of the parts of the
eye, with their natural colours, that they seemed to behold with
astonishment the eyes even of the spectators. To account for this
phenomenon, it may be supposed that, the hen being near laying, a
serpent presented itself to her sight, and that her imagination, struck
thereby, impressed the figure of the serpent on the egg that was ready
to press out of the ovarium.
An egg equally wonderful, was laid by a hen at Rome on the 14th. of
December, 1680. The famous comet that appeared then on the head of
Andromeda, with other stars, were seen represented on its shell.
Sebastian Scheffer says, that he had seen an egg with the representation
of an eclipse on it. Signor Magliabecchi, in his letter to the academy
of the Curious, on the 20th. of October 1682, has these words; "Last
month I had sent me from Rome, a drawing of an egg found at Tivoli, with
the impression of the sun and the transparent comet with a twisted
tail."
There are also representations of Indian nuts, or small cocos, with the
head of an ape. The nut has been exactly engraved in the Ephemerides of
the Curious, both as to size and form, and covered with its shell, as
expressed there by cyphers and other figures which represent the same
nut stripped of its covering, and exhibiting the head of an ape. This
nut seems pretty much like the foreign fruit described by Clusius,
Exoticorum lib. a, which John Bauhin (Hist. Plant. Universal Lib. 3)
retaining the description of Clusius, calls, "a nut resembling the
areca," and which C. Bauhin (Pinac. lib. II, sect. 6) calls, the fruit
of the fourteenth of Palm-tree, that bears nuts, or a foreign fruit of
the same sort as the areca.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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