d exterior of the parts of the
eye, with their natural colours, that they seemed to behold with
astonishment the eyes even of the spectators. To account for this
phenomenon, it may be supposed that, the hen being near laying, a
serpent presented itself to her sight, and that her imagination, struck
thereby, impressed the figure of the serpent on the egg that was ready
to press out of the ovarium.

An egg equally wonderful, was laid by a hen at Rome on the 14th. of
December, 1680. The famous comet that appeared then on the head of
Andromeda, with other stars, were seen represented on its shell.
Sebastian Scheffer says, that he had seen an egg with the representation
of an eclipse on it. Signor Magliabecchi, in his letter to the academy
of the Curious, on the 20th. of October 1682, has these words; "Last
month I had sent me from Rome, a drawing of an egg found at Tivoli, with
the impression of the sun and the transparent comet with a twisted
tail."

There are also representations of Indian nuts, or small cocos, with the
head of an ape. The nut has been exactly engraved in the Ephemerides of
the Curious, both as to size and form, and covered with its shell, as
expressed there by cyphers and other figures which represent the same
nut stripped of its covering, and exhibiting the head of an ape. This
nut seems pretty much like the foreign fruit described by Clusius,
Exoticorum lib. a, which John Bauhin (Hist. Plant. Universal Lib. 3)
retaining the description of Clusius, calls, "a nut resembling the
areca," and which C. Bauhin (Pinac. lib. II, sect. 6) calls, the fruit
of the fourteenth of Palm-tree, that bears nuts, or a foreign fruit of
the same sort as the areca.

This fruit with its shell, is, as Clusius says, an inch and a half in
length, but is somewhat more than an inch thick. Its shell or
membraneous covering, is about the thickness of the blade of a knife,
and outwardly of an ash colour mixed with brown. Clusius was in the
right to say, that the shell of this nut was formed of several fibrous
parts, but those fibres resemble rather those of the shell of a coco,
than the fibrous parts of the back of the areca nut. He, moreover, has
very properly observed, that this shell is armed, at its lower part,
with a double calyx and that the opposite part terminates in a point;
but it is necessary to observe, that this point is not formed by the
prolongation of the shell, as the figure he has given of it seems to
specify; b