TAIL-LIKE FORMATIONS IN MEN. 



357 



point of the excrescence had been loosed from that part. The 



formation did not contain any vertebra; the coccyx lay rather 



beneath, and there was evi- 

 dently in this, as in a similar 



case observed by Labourdette, 



a question of a so-called in- 



tercejited formation from the 



coccygeal lump period. The 



hide-bound tail offers an en- /: 



larged copy of the embryonal i-' 



coccygeal lump, and exhibits i < 



that lump, which in the nor- - 



mal development reverts and \ 



is merged in the buttock, ap- \ 



parently maintained and as- \^ 



sociated, as a rule, with an \' 



imperfect development of the f|. - 



anal orifice (Fig. 7). W^T 



A third class is composed [^|. 



of the " soft tails," which de- k^v 



pend freely from the sacral i ■ 



and coccygeal region and are 



the most frequent. They have 



sometimes the form of a 



swine's tail drawn out to a point; sometimes that of a thicker 



fleshy appendage only slightly rolled at the end. Such soft tails, 

 which belong to the largest of their kind and are 

 both naked and hairy, have been observed and 

 described, among others by Blancart, Konig, Els- 

 holtz, Schenk, von Grafenberg, and Greve. The 

 last author sent a tail three inches long (Fig. 8), 

 which he had amputated from a boy eight weeks 

 old, to Prof. Virchow for a more thorough exami- 

 nation, and he found that it was not a simple 

 case of skin formation, but that there lay within 

 the inner cell-texture of the skin a fatty bundle 

 penetrated by large vessels. In this species of 

 malformation — to which the case delineated in 

 Virchow's Archiv fiir pathologische Anatomie, 

 vol. Ixxxiii, No. 3, seems to belong — we have to 

 do, not with a simple impeded formation, such as 

 the last-mentioned case is considered to be, but 

 with the outgrowth of a part existing in the em- 

 bryonic plan, which, however, disappears in reg- 

 ular growth, into a monstrosity i)er excessum, as was the old form 



of expression. In many respects these cases are atavistic. The 



TlIEEE-DATS-OLD BoY, WITH HlDE-BOUNI; 



Tail. From Dr. Ma.\ BarteLs. 



Fig. 8. — Amputated 

 Tail of a Boy 

 Eight Weeks Old. 

 From Greve, 



