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The second class of cases, in which the diabolic agency is palpable to the layman as well as the doctor, Cotta illustrates thus: "In the time of their paroxysmes or fits, some diseased persons have been seene to vomit crooked iron, coales, brimstone, nailes, needles, pinnes, lumps of lead, waxe, hayre, strawe, and the like, in such quantities, figure, fashion, and proportion as could never possiblie pass down, or arise up thorow the natural narrownesse of the throate, or be contained in the unproportionable small capacitie, naturall susceptibilitie, and position of the stomake."

"Now if God Almighty do not countermand or check the ordinary course of nature, or the matter of elementary bodies here below be not unproportionable, and thereby unapt to receive their impressions, there is no reason why, in a natural and physical necessity, astrological predictions should not succeed and take effect, and by how much the knowledge which we have by the known causes is more demonstrative and infallible than that which we have either by signs or effects, so much by this companion doth Astrology appear worthy to be preferred before Physic."

The Stoics attribute sterility to the obliquity of the yard, by which means it is not able to ejaculate in a due manner, or to the unproportionable magnitude of the parts, the matrix being so contracted as not to have a capacity to receive. Erasistratus assigns it to the womb's being more callous or more carneous, thinner or smaller, than nature does require.