620 Page – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

Here is the translated text as follows:

588 X. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

We passed on to Aristotle; but with all his form and substance, his matter and motion, his cause and effect, he could not inform us how, without violating probability, the black man could get the white child. Therefore, as we gained no light, we had no need of any photometer to measure how much. Fearing to trust myself longer in the dark, I passed on to the next topic, recollecting an old maxim:

*Desperas tractata nitescere posse relinquas.*

But I had the consolation to think that for all that had yet passed between them, nobody was a bit the wiser.

The albinos, with their bloodshot eyes and white hair, along with the arctic owls, Swedish sparrows, and white birds of Canada, I leave to the curious in wild fowl.

The strength of the adversary's case I take to be this: that at a critical moment, after Mr. Whistleo and Miss Williams had been just long enough in bed together to be drawing towards a perfect understanding of the business which brought them there, the lady saw, or thought she saw, an apparition of a white man making towards her with his cocked pistol in his hand. The true point now is whether that apparition did of itself beget the child, or only change it from black to white after it was begotten, by acting upon the nervous system of the mother. The counsel showed a skill more than professional, which convinced me that he had gone deep into this subject and probed it successfully. He understands the doctrine of animal appetencies, if not of chemical affinities.

It is curious to see how the learned will differ. Professor Roederer denies the effect of maternal imagination in changing the form or color of the fetus; and for so doing, he gains the prize medal of the University of Göttingen. Doctor Mitchell maintains the effect of maternal imagination with all his might. And another profound and ingenious philosopher, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, denies this power in the female imagination but demonstrates its existence in the male, and says...

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