Cats kitned without tails, poultry without rumps

A favorite passage (another one that I can't include in the book--wrong time period, not relevant!) from Nathaniel Highmore's rather magical The history of generation. Examining the several opinions of divers authors, especially that of Sir Kenelm Digby, in his discourse of bodies. With a general relation of the manner of generation, as well in plants as animals: with some figures delineating the first originals of some creatures, evidently demonstrating the rest. To which is joyned a discourse of the cure of wounds by sympathy, or without any real applycation of medicines to the part affected, but especially by that powder, known chiefly by the name of Sir Gilbert Talbots powder (1651):




(Images courtesy of EEBO.)