Inheritance of Acquired Characters 255 



own experiments were not sufficiently numerous to have 

 obtained such cases. 



In this connection I may give an account of some observa- 

 tions that I made while carrying out some experiments in 

 telegony with mice. I found in one litter of mice that when 

 the young came out of the nest they were tailless. The same 

 thing happened again when the second litter was produced, 

 but this time I made my observations sooner, and examined 

 the young mice immediately after birth. I found that the 

 mother had bitten off, and presumably eaten, the tails of her 

 offspring at the time of birth. Had I been carrying on a 

 series of experiments to see if, when the tails of the parents 

 were cut off, the young inherit the defect, I might have been 

 led into the error of supposing that I had found such a case 

 in these mice. If this idiosyncrasy of the mother had reap- 

 peared in any of her descendants, the tails might have disap- 

 peared in succeeding generations. This perversion of the 

 maternal instincts is not difficult to understand, when we 

 recall that the female mouse bites off the navel-string of each 

 of her young as they are born, and at the same time eats the 

 afterbirth. Her instinct was carried further in this case, and 

 the projecting tail was also removed. 



Is it not possible that something of this sort took place in 

 Brown-Sequard's experiment ? The fact that the adults had 

 eaten off their own feet might be brought forward to indicate 

 the possibility of a perverted instinct in this case also. At least 

 my observation shows a possible source of error that must be 

 guarded against in future work on this subject. 



In regard to the 8th statement of Brown-Sequard, as 

 to various morbid states of the skin, Romanes did not test 

 this, because the facts which it alleges did not seem of a 

 sufficiently definite character. 



These experiments of Brown-Sequard, and of those who 

 have repeated them, may appear to give a brilliant experi- 

 mental confirmation of the Lamarckian position ; yet I think, 



