Page 755 - ULYSSES

Ulysses

chromolithographic illustrations. The gravest problems of
obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as
much animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of
pregnancy such as the forbidding to a gravid woman to

step over a countrystile lest, by her movement, the
navelcord should strangle her creature and the injunction
upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and
ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against that part
of her person which long usage has consecrated as the seat
of castigation. The abnormalities of harelip, breastmole,
supernumerary digits, negro’s inkle, strawberry mark and
portwine stain were alleged by one as a prima facie and
natural hypothetical explanation of those swineheaded (the
case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten) or
doghaired infants occasionally born. The hypothesis of a
plasmic memory, advanced by the Caledonian envoy and
worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land he stood
for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic
development at some stage antecedent to the human. An
outlandish delegate sustained against both these views,
with such heat as almost carried conviction, the theory of
copulation between women and the males of brutes, his
authority being his own avouchment in support of fables
such as that of the Minotaur which the genius of the

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