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Updated: May 13, 2025
As he approached the house with the Abate Taruffi, Faustina, seeing them, came down to meet them. Says the Doctor: "I was presented to her by my conductor, and found her a short, brown, sensible, lively old lady, who expressed herself much pleased to meet a cavalière Inglesi, as she had been honored with great marks of favor in England. Signor Hasse soon entered the room.
During gestation she manifested great uneasiness of mind, lest the birth of a mulatto offspring should disclose her conduct.... It so happened that her negro husband possessed a sixth digit on each hand, but there was no peculiarity of any kind in the white man, yet when the mulatto child was born it actually presented the deformity of a supernumerary finger. Taruffi, the celebrated Italian teratologist, in speaking of the subject, says: 'Our knowledge of this strange fact is by no means recent for Fienus, in 1608, said that most of the children born in adultery have a greater resemblance to the legal than to the real father' an observation that was confirmed by the philosopher Vanini and by the naturalist Ambrosini.
"If it be granted that the Biddenden Maids were pygopagous twins, a study of the histories of other recorded cases of this monstrosity serves to demonstrate many common characters. Thus, of the 8 cases which Taruffi has collected, in 7 the twins were female; and if to these we add the sisters Rosalie and Josepha Blazek and the Maids, we have 10 cases, of which 9 were girls.
If this be so, then the teratologic difficulty is removed, for the case becomes perfectly comparable with the well-known but rare type of double terata known as the pygopagous twins, which is placed by Taruffi with that of the ischiopagous twins in the group dicephalus lecanopagus. "Pygopagous twins are fetuses united together in the region of the nates and having each its own pelvis.
Although Schurig, Meckel, Himly, Taruffi, and others give bibliographic lists of diphallic terata, even in them erroneous references are common, and there is evidence to show that many cases have been duplicated under different names.
Nay, even when, some few months later, there died at Vienna the old Abate Metastasio, and his death brought home to a rather forgetful world what a poet and what a dramatist that old Metastasio had been; even then, an intimate friend of the dead man, a worldly priest, a quasi prelate, the Abate Taruffi, could find no better winding up for the funeral oration, delivered before all the pedants and prigs and fops and spies of pontifical Rome assembled in the rooms of the Arcadian academy, than to point to Count Vittorio Alfieri, and prophesy that Metastasio had found a successor greater than himself.
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