356 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of a spina bifida. Vircliow's law of the duplication of the cases 

 had not maintained itself under the first test. Of the various 

 other persons of this kind whose photographs Dr. Ornstein took, 

 we mention the recruit Q. G. Nikephorus, of Siphno, twenty years 

 old, in whom the thick brown hair of the sacral trichosis is very 

 sharply defined, and quite covers the sacrum. The hairs were in 

 this case from one and a half to two and three quarter inches 

 long, while no abnormal hairs were visible on the rest of his 

 somewhat slender body. 



It requires no particular gift for adapting evidence or of divi- 

 nation to infer from these cases of sacral trichosis, so frecjuent in 

 Greece, which are easily explained by reference to the embryonic 

 hairy covering, that the representations of Silenus and the fauns 

 in ancient Grecian art, in which this part of the body is furnished 

 with a tail-tuft of hair, may be traced back to casual observations 

 of such cases in real life. A strikingly naturalistic illustration 



of this view is afford- 

 /■;% . i A. ed by the Silenus with 



the Bacchus child in 

 the Louvre, in which, 

 instead of the isolated 

 horse-tail-like pencil 

 rising from the sa- 

 crum, characteristic of 

 most figures of the 

 kind, the whole sacral 

 region is represented 

 as well haired, while 

 the central lock is sim- 

 ply more strongly 

 prominent (Fig. G). 



What might be 

 called " hide - bound 

 tails," of which Dr. 

 Bartels describes a 



Fig. 6.-PART of the Back View of the Silentts with the Well-marked case that 

 Infant Bacchus, in the Louvre. From a Drawing by occurred in llis OWn 

 F. Schilfer. t ^ . • 



medical practice, in- 

 cline more decidedly to the order of real malformations. In a 

 three-days-old child, the skin over the coccyx formed a three- 

 sided lump of about the shape of the tail-termination of the em- 

 bryo. This lumpwas about seven eighths of an inch long, rose 

 several lines above the rest of the skin, and was separated from 

 it by a plainly defined groove. The pointed lower end of the 

 swelling seemed to lie directly over the anal orifice, which was 

 very narrow, and must have been operatively enlarged after the 



