TAIL-LIKE FORMATIONS IN MEN. 349 



a half long, which, when sucking, he wagged as a token of 

 pleasure. 



Apparently well-authenticated instances of human tails are 

 that of a Moi boy, twelve years old, who was found a few years 

 ago in Cochin-China, and had a tail about a foot long — simply a 

 mass of flesh — containing no bony frame (Fig. 1) ; and the case 

 communicated to the Berlin Anthroijological Society in July, 

 1890, by the Dutch resident at Ternate, of two natives of New 

 Guinea, who had come on board his steamer in Geelvink Bay, 

 in 1880 — adult male Papuans, in good health and spirits, well 

 shaped and muscular, who had coccygeal bones projecting four 

 centimetres, or an inch and a half in length. Dr. O. W. Holmes 

 says, in the Atlantic Monthly for June, 1890, that Dr. Priestley, 

 of London, showed him, at the Medical Congress in Washington, 

 a photograph of a boy who had " a very respectable tail." 



In The Popular Science Monthly for October, 1884, an account 

 was quoted from Mr. H. W. Eaton, of Louisville, Ky,, of a female 

 child that was hoxw in that city with what appeared to be a rudi- 

 mentary tail. It was visible as a '* fleshy peduncular protuber- 

 ance," about two inches and a quarter long, and measuring an 

 inch and a quarter round the base, shaped like a pig's tail, but 

 showing no sign of bone or cartilage, and was situated about an 

 inch above the lower end of the spinal column. It had grown 

 about a quarter of an inch in eight weeks. 



The questions, whether there exists in the human body, in a 

 rudimentary state, a real homologue of the tail of animals, and 

 whether it may sometimes be developed into a member of some- 

 what similar outward form, have been much discussed by physi- 

 ologists in recent years. Besides notes on the subject in an- 

 thropological, ethnographical, and geographical periodicals, four 

 larger essays have been published \\\)o\\ it, viz. : Mohnike's pam- 

 phlet on Tailed Men (Miinster, 1878) ; two papers by Prof. A. 

 Ecker, in the Archiv fiir Anthropologie (vol. xii, 1879), and in the 

 Archiv fiir Anatomie und Physiologie (1880, No. 6) ; and a pa- 

 per by Dr. Max Bartels in the Archiv fiir Anthropologie (1880) ; 

 all of which go into a searching consideration of the subject. The 

 late German scientific journal Kosmos, reviewing these papers a 

 few years years ago, deduced the following conclusions from the 

 evidence then before the world : 



The older anatomists treated the question in rather a matter- 

 of-fact way. They regarded the prolongation of the human back- 

 bone beyond the os sacrum, by three, four, or five vertebrae, with- 

 out much thought, as the analogous feature of the animal's tail, 

 and called it the tail -bone {os coccygis). The phenomenon was not 

 rare to them, nor did it seem wonderful that this part of the body 

 could, contrariwise to its general rule, escape being grown over. 



