Has he not nearer home a seed-field that lies fallow for the want of a ploughshare? A habit reprehensible
at puberty is second nature and an opprobium in middlelife. If he must dispense his balm of Gilead in
nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste to restore to health a generation of unfledged profligates let
his practice consist better with the doctrines that now engross him. His marital breast is the repository
of secrets which decorum is reluctant to adduce. The lewd suggestions of some faded beauty may console
him for a consort neglected and debauched but this new exponent of morals and healer of ills is at his
best an exotic tree which, when rooted in its native orient, throve and flourished and was abundant in
balm but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots have lost their quondam vigour while the
stuff that comes away from it is stagnant, acid and inoperative.
The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial usages of the Sublime Porte by
the second female infirmarian to the junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to
the delegation that an heir had been born. When he had betaken himself to the women's apartment to
assist at the prescribed ceremony of the afterbirth in the presence of the secretary of state for domestic
affairs and the members of the privy council, silent in unanimous exhaustion and approbation, the delegates,
chafing under the length and solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would palliate
a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail and officer rendered the easier, broke out at once
into a strife of tongues. In vain the voice of Mr Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring to urge, to
mollify, to restrain. The moment was too propitious for the display of that discursiveness which seemed
the only bond of union among tempers so divergent. Every phase of the situation was successively
eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean section, posthumity with respect
to the father and, that rarer form, with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as the Childs
murder and endered memorable by the impassioned plea of Mr Advocate Bushe which secured the
acquittal of the wrongfully accused, the rights of primogeniture and king's bounty touching twins and
triplets, miscarriages and infanticides, simulated and dissimulated, acardiac ftus in ftu, aprosopia due to
a congestion, the agnatia of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by Mr Candidate Mulligan) in consequence
of defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the medial line so that (as he said) one ear could hear
what the other spoke, the benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolongation of labour pains in
advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the vein, the premature relentment of the amniotic fluid
(as exemplified in the actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial insemination by
means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent upon the menopause, the problem of the perpetuation
of the species in the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that distressing manner of delivery
called by the Brandenburghers Sturzgeburt, the recorded instances of multigeminal, twikindled and
monstrous births conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parents - in a word all
the cases of human nativity which Aristotle has classified in his master-piece with chromolithographic
illustrations. The gravest problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much
animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as the forbidding to a gravid woman
to step over a country stile lest, by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and the
injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently 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, breastmole, supernumerary digits, negro's inkle, strawberry mark and portwine stain were
alleged by one as a primafacie and natural hypothetical explanation of swineheaded (the case of Madame
Grissel Steevens was not forgotten) or doghaired infants occasionally born. The hypothesis of a plasmic
memory, advanced by the taledonian envoy and worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land he
stood for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic development 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 between 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 allocution from Mr
Candidate Mulligan in that vein of pleasantry which none better than he knew know to affect, postulating
as the supremest object of desire a nice clean old man. Contemporaneously, a heated argument having
arisen between Mr Delegate Madden and Mr Candidate Lynch regarding the juridical and theological