CHAPTER VI.
MINOR TERATA.
Ancient Ideas Relative to Minor Terata .-- The ancients viewed with great interest the minor structural anomalies of man, and held them to be divine signs or warnings in much the same manner as they considered more pronounced monstrosities.

In a most interesting and instructive article, Ballantyne quotes Ragozin in saying that the Chaldeo-Babylonians, in addition to their other numerous subdivisions of divination, drew presages and omens for good or evil from the appearance of the liver, bowels, and viscera of animals offered for sacrifice and opened for inspection, and from the natural defects or monstrosities of babies or the young of animals.

Ballantyne names this latter subdivision of divination fetomancy or teratoscopy, and thus renders a special chapter as to omens derived from monstrous births, given by Lenormant:-- "The prognostics which the Chaldeans claimed to draw from monstrous births in man and the animals are worthy of forming a class by themselves, insomuch the more as it is the part of their divinatory science with which, up to the present time, we are best acquainted.

The development that their astrology had given to 'genethliaque,' or the art of horoscopes of births, had led them early to attribute great importance to all the teratologic facts which were there produced.

They claimed that an experience of 470,000 years of observations, all concordant, fully justified their system, and that in nothing was the influence of the stars marked in a more indubitable manner than in the fatal law which determined the destiny of each individual according to the state of the sky at the moment when he came into the world.