256 OUT OF DOORS. 



so that the artist of the Nurenberg Chronicle really 

 needed no great power of invention in many of his 

 representations. As for * women with beards descend- 

 ing on their breasts,' there is nothing very remarkable 

 about them, and plenty of instances have been known. 

 Perhaps some of my readers may have seen the late 

 * bearded lady,' Julia Pastrana, whose preternatural 

 ugliness, quick intelligence, proficiency in modern 

 languages, and agility in dancing, were, some years 

 ago, quite familiar to the British public. Her beard, 

 though it did not quite descend to her breast, was 

 stiffer, thicker, and longer than that of many a man ; 

 and yet her hair, a lock of which lies before me, was 

 not coarser than that of an ordinary Spanish woman. 

 And there was a lady, very well known in a certain 

 cathedral city a few years ago, who possessed a mous- 

 tache as thick and full as that of a life-guardsman, and 

 a beard of very fair dimensions. 



Bearded women naturally lead us to the hermaphro- 

 dites above-mentioned. I fancy that the idea was 

 originally taken from travellers' accounts of certain 

 divisions of the Malay race, in which the two sexes can 

 scarcely be distinguished from each other, except by 

 the fact that the women look much more masculine 

 than the men. Naturalists all know that, although 

 among the human race such a man-woman has never 

 been known, there are many creatures in which such a 

 phenomenon does take place. There is, for example, 

 scarcely any large collection of insects, whether public 



