440 SUPPOSED TRANSMISSIOA^ OF MUTILATIONS. [VITI. 



be taken into account. The following case is, in this respect, 

 very instructive. 



Last summer, my friend. Prof Schottelius, of Freiburg, 

 brought me a kitten with an innate rudimentary tail, which he 

 had accidentally discovered as one of a family of kittens at 

 Waldkirch, a small town in the southern part of the Black 

 Forest. The mother of the kitten possessed a perfectly normal 

 tail ; the father could not be identified. 



A closer investigation resulted in the following rather un- 

 expected discovery. For some years past, tailless kittens have 

 frequently appeared in the families of many different mother 

 cats at Waldkirch, and this fact is explained in the following 

 manner. A clergyman, who lived for some time at Waldkirch, 

 had married an English lady who possessed a tailless male 

 Manx cat. The probability that all the tailless cats in Waldkirch 

 are more or less distant descendants of that male cat almost 

 amounts to certainty. Since a male Manx cat has reached the 

 Black Forest, it might equally well arrive at some other place. 



But we will now leave observations such as these, which do 

 not prove the transmission of a mutilation, because the mutila- 

 tion itself has not been established ; and we will turn to more 

 serious ' proofs.' 



Let us still consider the tails of domesticated animals. In 

 these animals a spontaneous and considerable reduction of the 

 tail occurs not uncommonly, and since the habit of cutting off 

 part of the tail of young animals prevails in many countries, 

 the coincidence has been explained as a causal relation, and 

 the question has been raised whether the disposition towards 

 the spontaneous appearance of rudimentary tails has not arisen 

 in consequence of the artificial mutilation practised through 

 many generations. This supposition appears very plausible 

 at first sight, but the keen scientific criticism of Doderlein, 

 Richter, and Bonnet, together with careful anatomical investi- 

 gations, have shown that, at least in the cases which were 

 carefully examined, such a causal connection did not exist. 

 It has been shown that the spontaneous rudimentary tails 

 which occasionally appear in cats and dogs have an entirely 

 different origin from the transmission of artificial mutilation. 

 They depend upon an innate peculiarity of the germ, a pecu- 

 liarity' which is easily and strongly transmitted. They are 



