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movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and
the injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardent-
ly and ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against
that part of her person which long usage has consecrated as
the seat of castigation. The abnormalities of harelip, breast-
mole, supernumerary digits, negro’s inkle, strawberry mark
and portwine stain were alleged by one as a prima facie and
natural hypothetical explanation of those swineheaded
(the case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten)
or doghaired infants occasionally born. The hypothesis of
a plasmic memory, advanced by the Caledonian envoy and
worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land he stood
for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic develop-
ment at some stage antecedent to the human. An outlandish
delegate sustained against both these views, with such heat
as almost carried conviction, the theory of copulation be-
tween women and the males of brutes, his authority being
his own avouchment in support of fables such as that of the
Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin poet has
handed down to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. The
impression made by his words was immediate but shortlived.
It was effaced as easily as it had been evoked by an allocu-
tion from Mr Candidate Mulligan in that vein of pleasantry
which none better than he knew how to affect, postulating
as the supremest object of desire a nice clean old man. Con-
temporaneously, a heated argument having arisen between
Mr Delegate Madden and Mr Candidate Lynch regarding
the juridical and theological dilemma created in the event
of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other, the difficulty by