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Updated: July 18, 2025
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.
A kindly adviser suggested a gymnasium to keep him in condition for professional purposes. He took the advice, and in the course of time became a splendid young animal, a being so physically perfect as to be what the good vicar of Bludston had called him in tired jest a lusus naturae.
"If the case be put of a partridge, there can be no doubt but an action would lie; for though this be ferae naturae, yet being reclaimed, property vests: but being the case of a singing bird, though reclaimed, as it is a thing of base nature, it must be considered as nullius in bonis.
But the enormous stimulus which Linnaeus gave to the investigation of nature soon rendered it impossible that any one man should write another "Systema Naturae," and extremely difficult for any one to become even a naturalist such as Linnaeus was.
In the 'Systema Naturae' Linnaeus calls it in a note, 'Homo caudatus', and seems inclined to regard it as a third species of man. According to Temminck, 'Satyrus Tulpii' is a copy of the figure of a Chimpanzee published by Scotin in 1738, which I have not seen.
Linnaeus was a naturalist in this wide sense, and his 'Systema Naturae' was a work upon natural history, in the broadest acceptation of the term; in it, that great methodising spirit embodied all that was known in his time of the distinctive characters of minerals, animals, and plants.
History and biography are, undoubtedly, on a different footing in this respect, just as the artist who calls his picture "Arundel Castle" or "Windermere" is not in the same position of freedom as the painter of an "Evening on the Downs." But the law of homo additus naturae still remains true in this case as in the other, though its application is modified.
What was the elevated note of scientific medicine which gradually superseded the empirical method? While empirical medicine believed in blood-letting and blistering, scientific medicine elevated and illustrated the ancient principle which had been forgotten, and which contained all the new wisdom in a synthesis: the medicinal force of nature, vis medicatrix naturae.
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.
His plan referred altogether to Sensation. He proceeded by observing, analyzing, and classifying facts-instantiae naturae, as they were affectedly called into general laws. Aries Tottle's mode, in a word, was based on noumena; Hog's on phenomena.
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