Feminescence, and Rejuvenescence, 273 



of the virile characters in the female, as he has noticed this cir- 

 cumstance in his book ; and he miglit have named this condi- 

 tion Feminescence, from the same analogy on which the other 

 terms are framed. 



On the subject of Virilescence, the author quotes the autho- 

 rity of Hippocrates and Aristotle, and traces the origin of the 

 ftibles of the middle ages concerning a " mutatio sexus" to the 

 facts which they have related, and to the mythological sayings 

 of the Grecian poets ; yet such a change was not entirely with- 

 out support from ascertained facts : old women had been seen 

 with beards, and their voices had assumed the manly character ; 

 persons who had been educated as females had been seen to 

 assume all the attributes of men ; and others, who as women 

 had remained barren in marriage, became the fathers of chil- 

 dren. Such instances as these, which a careful inquiry would 

 liave robbed of all their value as facts, were strengthened by 

 the opinion of Galen that the parts of generation are the same 

 in both sexes, and vary only in position, the same parts being 

 situated externally in men which are placed inwardly in fe- 

 males ; by that of Aristotle, that a woman is merely an imper- 

 fect man ; and by the scholastic dogma, that Nature, under all 

 circumstances, aims at perfection. Eusebius Nieremberg and 

 Ulysses Aldrovandus had done their best to confirm these er- 

 rors, by tales of exotic animals in which this conversion of sexes 

 was a natural characteristic ; and the doctrine was not entirely 

 abandoned, even by anatomists, before the end of the sixteenth 

 century. The seventeenth century, however, saw the error 

 cojnpletely dispelled ; and since then the whdle subject of mu- 

 tation of sex, instead of being a tissue of fables, has become an 

 interesting branch of natural history. 



Virilencence. — Those appearances which our author includes 

 under the general name of virilescence, occur in females in 

 Avhom one or more of the peculiar characteristics of their own 

 sex have passed away, and consist in the assumption of some 

 ])eculiar qualities of the male. The assumed characters differ 

 in different cases, but agree in bearing a close resemblance to 

 some part of the male frame, other than the organs of genera- 

 tion themselves. Virilescence, therefore, can take place only 

 in those animals which continue to live some time after the 



