350 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and project free like an animal's tail, or that it might occasionally 

 be prolonged through additions to the number of vertebrae ; for 

 they had a deej^er insight into the normal agreement of the fun- 

 damental scheme in the structure of man and the animals most 

 nearly related to him than some of the physicians and anatomists 

 of our own time seem to have. 



But after the great '' fall of man," as Ecker expressively calls 

 it, or after man had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge 

 which Darwin offered to him, we apparently did not dare to call 

 the thing any more by its right name. We did not venture, ac- 

 cording to Prof. His, to speak of the tail of the human embryo, 

 although we could still speak without hesitation of its gill-arch. 

 Man was ashamed, as Ecker has humorously characterized the 

 prudery of the learned, only of his nearer, not of his more dis- 

 tant, cousins. The older anatomists and artists — we name here, 

 as typical representatives of these, only Harvey, Meckel, and 

 Goethe — found it natural that this taillet, instead of bending in- 

 ward, as usual, toward the pelvis, and being buried in the mus- 

 cular part, as though that were, of course, one of man's par- 

 ticular characteristics, should occasionally jiroject outAvard and 

 assume the form of an external tail. They did not regard it as 

 surprising that a formation of this kind should sometimes ajj- 

 pear ; and they found in the persons who possessed such growths, 

 not, like the men of the preceding age, the consequences of a 

 bestial intercourse or of a fault of the mother ; not even a mon- 

 strous formation in the common sense of the word, but rather 

 evidence of the adaptability of Nature and of a common type 

 marking all the higher animals. Thus Goethe wrote on the 12th 

 of September, 1787, from Rome : " The tailed men are no wonder 

 to me; but are, according to the description, something quite 

 natural. There are much more wonderful things before our eyes 

 which we do not regard, because they are not so nearly related 

 to us." 



The brief essay of Dr. O. Mohnike is based on the fact that all 

 the forms of the backbone of man are related to his erect posture, 

 and that the prolongation is turned inward in order to afford a 

 support to the viscera, which is not needed in animals that go on 

 all fours. He therefore believes that a prolongation of the coccyx 

 outside of the periphery of the rump, analogous to the tail of an 

 animal, would be incompatible with the typical human form, all 

 the parts of which collectively point to the erect gait, and contra- 

 dictory to it. 



A similar inversion is indicated in the anthropoid apes, that 

 have no external tail and sometimes go erect, and is believed by 

 Hyrtl to be produced gradually in dogs and bears that are taught 

 to dance on their hind legs. All this goes to show, if there were 



