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?
But, it may be urged, if it was not affected by the imagination of the mother, why did the child come into the world with broken limbs? However rash it may appear to explain a matter which is extraordinary and uncertain, and of which we have no right to exact a solution, yet this question appears to me answerable in a satisfactory manner. Circumstances of the most rare and extraordinary kind happen as necessarily as those which are frequent and common. In the infinite combinations which matter can take, the most extraordinary arrangements must sometimes happen; hence we might venture to wager, that in a million, or a thousand millions of children, there will be one born with two heads, four legs, or with broken limbs; it may, therefore, naturally happen, without the concurrence of the mother's imagination, that a child should be born with broken limbs. This may have happened more than once, and the mother, while pregnant, might have been present at the breaking on the wheel, and therefore the defect of the child's formation has been attributed to what she had seen, and to her impressed imagination. But, independant of this general answer, we may give a more direct explanation. The foetus, as we have said, has nothing in common with the mother; its functions, organs, blood, &c. are all particular, and belong to itself; the only thing which it derives from its mother is the liquor, or nutritive lymph, which filtrates from the matrix. If this lymph is bad, or envenomed with the venereal virus, the child will be alike disordered; and it may be imagined, that all the diseases which proceed from vitiated humours may be communicated from the mother to the child. We know that the small-pox is communicative, and we have but too many examples of children who are, directly after their birth, the victims of the debauches of their parents. The venereal virus attacks the most solid parts of the bones, and it appears to act with more force towards the middle of the bone, where ossification commences; I conceive, therefore, that the child here spoken of has been attacked by the venereal disorder while in its mother's womb, and from that cause it came into the world with its bones broken through the middle.