REVIEW. 
593 
cannot be too particular, and this law explains much that 
has puzzled clever men. The above statements are, how- 
ever, not enunciated for the first time; but there is one 
statement which we have not seen before, and of which we 
shall be glad to have corroborative evidence. Mr. Orton 
relates an instance, showing “ that it is not necessary that the 
intercourse between the male and female should be & fruitful 
one to leave its traces. A Berkshire boar which proved 
impotent, and which, on being slaughtered, was found to 
be, if not an hermaphrodite , at all events peculiarly developed , 
having four testicles , besides other peculiarities ,* was put to three 
sows, each from distinct litters, and of the Cumberland and 
Westmoreland breeds. Proving barren, these sows were next 
served by a Cumberland boar. In every litter, at least three 
of the pigs resembled, in most, if not in every particular, 
the Berkshire boar to which the sows were originally put, 
especially in the marks of the body and the disposition of 
the ears and tail.” 
In accounting for these strange traces of the previous 
congress of the male, the author attributes it neither to the 
imagination of the female, acting on the foetus in utero, nor 
to a process of inoculation, by which the blood of the female 
acquires certain properties which operate on her subsequent 
progeny, but he considers that it depends upon the ovarian 
system of the female : “ those ova,” he says, “ which are suffi- 
ciently matured to take on vitality, are fecundated, and pass 
to the uterine cavity, there to be developed, while at the same 
time a number of the less matured ova receive an influence 
or impress short of vitality, which remains by them, and 
modifies the subsequent action of the male, which at another 
and after period gives them vitality; ” and he further illus- 
trates this by the case of the turkey-hen, being fecundated by 
one impregnation for a whole season. 
* We have put the above extract in italics, on account of its extra- 
ordinary statement ; for the first time we hear of a hermaphrodite having 
four testes. We had in our innocence believed, that by a hermaphrodite was 
meant an individual that partook of both sexes, with organs difficult to 
characterise ; but an impotent animal with four testes is an anomaly indeed — 
one would believe him doubly vigorous. — (Reviewer.) 
