v. Fécondité, a report of a trial before the Parliament of

Grenoble, in which the question was, whether a certain infant could be declared legitimate which was born after the husband had been absent from his wife four full years. The wife asserted that the baby was the offspring of a dream, in which she had a vivid idea that her wandering spouse had returned to love and duty. Midwives and physicians were consulted, and reported on the subject. As a result, the Parliament ordained that the infant should be adjudged legitimate, and that its mother should be regarded as a true and honourable wife. The judgment bears date 13th February 1537.

The quaint ideas associated in mythology with the supernatural generation here referred to have been various. In some instances they have been wholly poetical, as when we are told that "the Supreme" by his union with law and order (Themis) produced "Justice," "the Hours," "Good Laws," and "Peace" (Hesiod Theogony, 900), and as when Europa is said to have tempted Jupiter to leave Phoenicia, and travel westward to Crete as the first step towards the colonization of an unknown continent. In other instances, the ideas have been framed upon the very natural belief that anyone--whether existent in story only, or in reality--who has greatly surpassed his fellows, must have had a large element of the Deity in his constitution. In other instances, the notion has been associated with the once prevalent belief, that the Creator had a sex, to which we shall refer by and by; and in other cases, the fancy has clearly been mingled with the fact, that many an unmarried woman has attributed to some god, a pregnancy, or baby, which has been due, in reality, to a very mortal man. Here we may notice that the fecundity which damsels of old were wont to refer to a god or some inferior, but yet beneficent, deity, more modern christian girls have associated with a demon. Jupiter and Apollo being replaced by a special class of imps who were named "incubi," and of the particulars of whose embraces the strangest stories are told. This small truth seems to be sufficient to demonstrate that the Greeks were not familiar with the being to whom we give the name of "Satan" and the "Devil," and that their belief coincided in one respect with that of the older Jews, who considered that whatever occurrence happened in the world, whether apparently for good or evil, was done by Jehovah, or as the Hellenic damsels reported by Jupiter, Apollo, or Mars.

Here, too, I may be permitted to introduce a remark suggested by a narrative, told to me by a lady of high British rank. She had been brought up in a foreign country under the eye of a sensible and pious, we may add prudish, mother, who endeavoured to shield her daughter from all contact with external vicious influences, and to prevent her ears or her mind from ever coming to the knowledge of those matters which are associated with love, marriage, and offspring. When the young lady naturally inquired of mamma where the infants sprang from which came into the world and grew up around her, she was told, "from God," and she was referred to Psalm cxxvii. 3, which declares that "children are an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is His reward." After having attained adult age, and being wholly imbued with this belief, she, on one occasion, expressed her opinion that Mademoiselle--who had recently been confined--must have been a peculiarly virtuous maiden, to have received so great a present as a baby from the beneficent Creator. This speech fell like a bombshell amongst a mixed company, but she knew not why. It was not until her marriage some time subsequently, that she learned that infants were said to come from God or the Devil according to circumstances, but that in reality they were always due to men and women.

The anecdote given above, naturally enables us to call attention to the remarkable fact that though the Grecian poets repeatedly spoke of maidens being fertilized by a divinity, yet Greek fathers never paid any heed to the power of that god, whom their daughters asserted to have operated upon their femininity; but always treated the earthly love of the alleged celestial spouse, as if the latter was wholly powerless to punish the hard-hearted parent, who had no scruples to turn his daughter from his door, so that she might hide her shame in distant lands. In those classic times, procreation by a god upon a human being was the attempted cover for bastardy. Moreover, even the woman herself, to whom Jupiter or Apollo was alleged to have descended from heaven to honour, felt herself so much injured by the visit, that she either tried to destroy the resulting offspring with her own hands, or exposed it upon a mountain to the tender mercies of dogs and vultures. Much in the same way many a modern maiden places her shame-covered infant in the turn-table of a foundling institution. Antiope, for example, the daughter of a king of Thebes, was, according to her version, beloved by

Jupiter, who visited her in the form of a satyr and implanted twins. When she discovered the coming event, which casts its shadow before, she left the paternal mansion, to avoid her father's anger, and fled to a mountain, on which she left her hapless offspring. They were found by shepherds and brought up.

The story of fair Leucothöe is still more to the point. She was sufficiently beautiful to attract Apollo, who seduced her under the form of her own mother--not a very likely story it is true, but the two lived happily together until a rival told the loved one's father of the amour. The incensed paterfamilias ordered his daughter to be buried alive, and yet the god who could change her body after death into the frankincense tree, and himself into a matronly looking woman and yet retain his sex, could not prevent his earthly spouse from dying a cruel death. In other words, Orchamus, the parent of the damsel, wholly disbelieved in the existence of a divine "spark," and felt assured that his daughter had disgraced herself with a man far below her in earthly rank.

From these, and a number of other Grecian anecdotes, we can draw no other conclusions than that the sires in those days were as jealous of the honour of their daughters as we are of our own now; that when that honour was in danger of being tarnished, a god was alleged by the damsel to be the offender; that the story was not believed; and that the daughter fled, was punished, or was pardoned, according to the sternness or credulity of the parents. The idea that individuals who were the sons or daughters of a god, must necessarily be great and good, does not appear to have prevailed amongst the ancient Greeks. Nay, we may even doubt whether any of them really believed that Jupiter, Apollo, or Neptune, could, or had ever become incarnate, for the sole purpose of impregnating a human female. That such an idea, however, prevailed amongst the Babylonians we learn from Herodotus, who informs us, book i.