OF THE SEXUAL ORGANS. 81 



the two half cylinders which are said to constitute its first rudiments, 

 have disobeyed the laws of conjunction discovered by M. Serres; 

 but, unfortunately it happens in this as in most other cases, the mo- 

 tives, the causes escape our research, and these brilliant concep- 

 tions have but one fault, and that is, they do not agree with actual 

 observation. I am bold to affirm, from numerous researches, that 

 the womb and vagina in reality present, from their very first appear- 

 ance, the same form, and the same general characters, as those they 

 possess after their complete development. 



§. X. HerinapBirodi^m. 



204. A being in whom two sexes are united is called an herma- 

 phrodite; this name, according to fable, is derived from Hermaphro- 

 dite, the son of Mercury (Egft;;j) and Venus (A^goSifi^j,) who was 

 condemned by the gods to unite his body to that of Salmacis for 

 having despised the charms of that nymph. Often debated in the 

 courts of justice in times past, and by the physiologists of all ages, 

 the question of hermaphrodism or androgyny, almost wholly aban- 

 doned towards the close of the last century, seems on the point of 

 coming up again to divide the opinions of the learned. In the mo- 

 noecious plants, in zoophytes, and various molusca, such as the oys- 

 ter and snail, the two germs are found to exist in the same indivi- 

 dual; but the sexes are observed to be separate in the dioscious 

 vegetables, and in the animal kingdom, in worms, insects, and also 

 in fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammiferous animals. So that her- 

 maphrodism in the human species is, at least to all appearance, 

 contrary to those laws that preside over the grand distinctions of 

 living beings. Notwithstanding this, M. Tiedemann, setting out on 

 the principle that the embryo is at the beginning neither male nor 

 female, admits the possibility of hermaphrodism, and his opinion is 

 maintained in Germany by M. Meckel and several other physiolo- 

 gists. It is true that a strange assemblage of organs has been fre- 

 quently noticed, which, though in the same subject, appeared to 

 belong to different sexes; but all cases of this sort, when divested 

 of the marvellous with which ignorance or the love of the marvel- 

 lous has clothed them, may be easily classed with some kind of 

 monstrosity of one or the other of the sexes. No individual has 

 ever been seen to possess both the male and female genital organs. 

 On some occasions an enormous clitoris has induced the belief that 

 the individual was at once male and female, and, like some of the 

 gasteropoda, capable both of fecundating and being fecundated. 

 Sometimes it is a slightly developed penis, an hypospadiaeos, a slit in 

 the scrotum, that have been mistaken for a vulva and clitoris, as in 



