At first, I was a little confused when I read Daston's explanations of three different reactions to monstrous births: horror, pleasure, or repugnance. I thought it was interesting that there were two different negative reactions to these monsters. It seemed to reflect the society's current view of the relationship between themselves and nature. The monster was interpreted with horror if the society (earlier on in this period, especially heavily religious ones) did not really feel "in control" or recognized itself as having a poor understanding of nature. However, if a society felt like it knew what was going on with nature, it viewed it as more of an error or an accident. And while that latter view of the monsters seems conducive to finding solutions for them, are the authors saying that this may not be a good thing; that it leads to a closed-minded view of anything that doesn't seem normal at first? (The passage that caught my eye was, "'The first negro was however a monster for white women, and the first of our beauties was a monster in the eyes of negroes'" (213).