TAIL-LIKE FORMATIONS IN MEN. 359 



The myths of tailed human races constantly revert to the East 

 Indian islands; and the Dutch captain, L. F. W. Schulze, sent 

 communications to the Berlin Anthropological Society in 1877 

 concerning cases* partly observed by himself, which were re- 

 garded by Dr. Bartels as fully trustworthy. These communica- 

 tions tell us nothing new, for the phenomena occur in cultivated 

 Europe as well as in remote deserts and lone islands. Other 

 reports, like that, for example, of Julius Kogel concerning the 

 Dya,ks of Borneo, speak of the frequent occurrence of tailed indi- 

 viduals. Hence a low, beastly race has been supposed, in which 

 atavistic formations occur still more frequently than among' 

 higher races further removed from the original condition. Still 

 other reports, and more recent, mention fully tailed human 

 races. 



Even if a phenomenon of this kind were established we need 

 not, as Dr. Bartels has justly remarked, conceive of a still living 

 middle form between man and bea"st. " We must consider," he 

 says, '''that we are all the time dealing with insular populations 

 who have been crowded out of the possession of their coast and 

 harbor regions by people of other races and driven into the 

 hardly accessible interior of the country, where they have been 

 compelled to practice, for a length of time we can not estimate, a 

 constant inbreeding — a regular series of marriages within their 

 own tribe. In this case there might, at some time in the past, as 

 has happened with other men, have occurred an external tail, as 

 a casual abnormity at first, but which might afterward, in the 

 course of generations, become transmitted to many persons by in- 

 heritance. For it has been shown by researches in this inter- 

 esting field of pathological anatomy that nothing is more easily 

 transmissible than malformations. In illustration of this fact we 

 need only mention here the well-known inclination to the in- 

 heritability of what are called mother's marks and hare-lips, and 

 the large teeth of the Melanesians of the Admiralty Islands and 

 the island of Agome, which have been described by Mr. Miklucho- 

 Maclay.f In a similar manner Lord Monboddo, in the last 

 century, explained the tailed men of Borneo as a people afflicted 

 with a hereditary malformation, and compared them with six- 

 fingered families. X 



In agreement with this is what the Wesleyan missionary 

 George Brown related in 1870 con(;erning a formal breeding of a 

 tailed race of men in Kali, off New Britain. " Tailless children," 

 he says, " are slain at once, or they would be exposed to general 

 ridicule." * A tailed family of princes have borne rule in Rajpoo- 

 tana and are earnestly attached to the ancestral mark. Dr. 



* See Kosmos, vol. i, p. 166. % Kosmos, vol. v, p. 449. 



f Bartels, p. 4. * Mohnike, p. 3. 



