TAIL-LIKE FORMATIONS IN MEN. 355 



ered with a thick, dark-brown hairy growth, about three inches 

 in length, which spreads over on to either side. The hairs lie 

 more smoothly on the border of the skin covering the sacrum, 

 while in the middle they curl out into two strong tufts. The man 

 is about five feet two inches high, and his yellowish-brown skin 

 shows elsewhere on his wdiole body less than the usual hairiness. 

 The recruit said that he was born with this unusual hair on his 

 back, and that he had even in youth suffered on account of it 

 from the curiosity of the people of his native village. He said 

 also that the growth had once been so strong that he had braided 

 the hair into queues and tied it in front, but that since then he 

 had preferred to cut it from time to time. To test the accuracy 

 of this assertion, Dr. Ornstein forbade his cutting the hair for a 

 considerable period; and eight months afterward (December, 

 1875) the sacrum-hair had grown to double its former length, or 

 to six inches ; so that the recruit's assertions respecting it were 

 shown not to be incredible. 



Prof. Virchow accompanied the detailed communication of 

 this case to the Berlin Anthropological Society * with a few well- 

 chosen words prefacing the opinion that we have perhaps to deal 

 here with a spina bifida occulta, which is indicated exteriorly, as 

 occurs often in the case of moles, mother's marks, etc., by aug- 

 mented growth of hair. There has existed, he said, for a con- 

 siderable time, a doctrine — we might call it a superstition — in 

 pathological anatomy, which is called the law of the duplication 

 of cases. " On the same morning that I received the letter from 

 Athens, it was told me that there was a corpse in the Pathological 

 Institute which exhibited an unusual hairiness on the back." 

 Since we had to do in this case with a spina bifida occulta, there 

 might perhaps be a similar pathological cause in the case of the 

 Greek recruit. But the hair on the Berlin woman's back sprang 

 from a higher spot, and did not denote the more thickly haired 

 coccygeal region of the human embryo. In continuation of these 

 efforts of Virchow to follow up these abnormal formations in the 

 human body resembling animal shapes to their pathological 

 causes, and in order to learn how to obviate them, Surgeon-Gen- 

 eral Ornstein kept watch upon the parts of the body concerned in 

 the eruption, and in the next year (1876) succeeded in establishing 

 a second case of well-defined sacral trichosis, marked by thick, 

 dark-brown hair, extending to the coccygeal region. In the next 

 year (1877) ten other cases fell under his attention, by which it 

 became evident that this sacral hairiness was not rare in Greece 

 and the islands of the ^gean Sea ; and he was convinced that in 

 all the cases the basis of it was normal and there was no question 



* Sitzungsberichte der Berliner ant')ropologiscliev Gesellsehaft in dcr Zeitschrift fur 

 Ethnologie, 1875, pp. 91 and 279. 



