TAIL-LIKE FORMATIONS IN MEN. 347 



TAIL-LIKE FORMATIONS IN MEN. 



AFTER THE EESEARCHES OF DR. BARTELS, PROF. ECKEE, DR. MOHNIKE, 

 DR. OENSTEIN, AND OTHERS. 



TRADITIONS of tailed men are very old and wide-spread. 

 Tailed races are told of in many countries, whose home is, 

 however, usually placed in some little-known region ; and the 

 stories of individuals who had tails can hardly be counted. A 

 number of legends on the subject have been collected by Mr. S. 

 Baring-Gould, and jmblished in his Curious Myths of the Middle 

 Ages. This author himself was brought up in the belief that all 

 Cornishmen had tails, and was not undeceived till a good Cornish 

 bookseller, with whom he formed a warm friendship, assured 

 him that this was not the case ; after which he satisfied himself 

 that the man had sat his tail off ; and his nurse informed him 

 that that was what happened to men of sedentary habits. 



Certain men of Kent were said to have had tails inflicted upon 

 them in punishment for their insults to St. Thomas a Becket. 

 The story runs that Avhen the saint came to Stroud on the Med- 

 way, the inhabitants of the place, being eager to show some mark 

 of contumely to him in his disgrace, did not scruple to cut ofif the 

 tail of the horse on which he was riding ; and for this, according 

 to Polydor Vergil, " it so happened, by the will of God, that all 

 the offspring born from the men who had done this thing were 

 born with tails like brute animals. But this mark of infamy, 

 which formerly was everywhere notorious, has disappeared with 

 the extinction of the race whose fathers perpetrated the deed." 

 The story seems to have been applied, with variations, to other 

 Englishmen, now here, now there, so that John Bale complained, 

 in the time of Edward VI, " that an Englyshman now can not 

 travayle in another land by Avay of marchandyse or any other 

 honest occupyinge, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his 

 tethe that all Englyshmen have tails." 



A Polish writer tells of a witch who transformed a bridal com- 

 pany, stepping over a girdle of human skin which she had laid in 

 the doorway, into wolves. She afterward, by throwing dresses 

 of fur over them, gave them their human forms ; but the bride- 

 groom's dress was not long enough to cover his tail, and he kept 

 it ; whence it became hereditary in his family. John Struys, a 

 Dutch traveler, who visited Formosa in the seventeenth century, 

 relates that a member of his party got separated from the rest and 

 was mangled and killed by a wild man, who was afterward caught 

 and tied up for execution, when, says the traveler, '' I beheld what 

 I had never thought to see. Ho had a tail more than a foot long, 

 covered with red hair, and very like that of a cow. When he saw 



