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Updated: July 13, 2025
It is found that what used to be called lusus naturae, or freaks of nature, are just as much subject to laws as the naturally developed forms of living creatures.
"The dolts were lusus naturæ!" exclaimed the dissolute Cornbury, losing all his reserve in a manner that better suited his known and confirmed character. "You should have caged them, Skimmer, and profited by their dullness, to lay the curious under contribution. Don't mistake me, Sir, if I speak a little in confidence.
Here is one who in common delivers words too big for a humble mouth to hold, so much beside himself, that his voice is as shrill as the whistle of the whip-poor-will! Courage! what is it, man? what is it?" "A prodigy! a lusus naturae! a monster, that nature has delighted to form, in order to exhibit her power!
To have ice in one's blood. To make a story of all strange and impossible things, as the Salamander, the Phoenix. The semblance of a human face to be formed on the side of a mountain, or in the fracture of a small stone, by a lusus naturae. The face is an object of curiosity for years or centuries, and by and by a boy is born, whose features gradually assume the aspect of that portrait.
The "Four-eyed Man of Cricklade" was a celebrated English monstrosity of whom little reliable information is obtainable. He was visited by W. Drury, who is accredited with reporting the following "'So wondrous a thing, such a lusus naturae, such a scorn and spite of nature I have never seen.
Here's a pretty little girl: money I suppose in sufficiency everything satisfactory, except, I grant you, the campaigner. The lad might daub his canvases, christen a child a year, and be as happy as any young donkey that browses on this common of ours but he must go and heehaw after a zebra forsooth! a lusus naturae is she!
A shade of annoyance, however, rested for a moment on the face of his companion, for she recognised the voices, and knew well that the quiet tete-a-tete with her willing and intelligent pupil must now be interrupted. "My cousins," she remarked, putting a touch on the cow that stamped that animal a lusus naturae for all time coming. Another whoop told that the cousins were drawing near.
The years slip away fugacious, and Time that brings forth her children only to devour them grins most hellishly, for Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle? You wouldn't have me put on exhibition as a lusus naturae?" "Oh, but I wish you had not altered so entirely!" Pauline sighed.
In other words, geniuses don't crop up irregularly anywhere, 'quite promiscuous like'; they have their fixed laws and their adequate causes: they are the result and effect of certain fairly demonstrable concatenations of circumstance: they are, in short, a natural product, not a lusus naturæ. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
Superstition seems, indeed, to be, next to the making of stone- weapons, the earliest method of asserting his superiority to the brutes which has occurred to that utterly abnormal and fantastic lusus naturae called man.
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