426 THE SUPPOSED TRANSMISSION OF MUTILATIONS. 



especially strong 1 proofs by my opponents, and which have been 

 carefully and completely examined. I shall attempt to show that 

 these are not conclusive and that they must be explained in an 

 entirely different manner. The insufficiency of the proof does not 

 always depend upon the same circumstances, and, according- to the 

 latter, we may distinguish different classes of cases. 



First of all we may briefly mention those instances in which the ne- 

 cessary precautions have not been taken before drawing conclusions. 



To this class belong the tailless cats which were shown at last 

 year's (1887) Meeting of the Association of German Naturalists, 

 at Wiesbaden. These cats had inherited their taillessness, or rather 

 their rudimentary tails, from the mother cat, which ' was said ' to 

 have lost her tail by the wheel of a cart having passed over it. 

 Not only did the owner of the cats, Dr. Zacharias, consider them as 

 a proof of the transmission of mutilations, but in a recently- 

 published work, entitled ' On the Origin of Species, based upon the 

 Transmission of acquired characters ' (' Ueber die Entstehung der 

 Arten auf Grundlage des Vererbens erworbener Eigenschaften '), 

 the author, Prof. Eimer, speaks of these cats in the preface as a 

 'valuable' instance of the transmission of mutilations: these ex- 

 amples therefore form part of the foundation upon which the author 

 builds up his theoretical views. 



Certainly, the want of tails in young cats, of which the mother 

 had lost its tail by an accident, would have been well worth 

 consideration, but unfortunately there is no trustworthy record 

 as to how the mother cat became tailless. Without absolute 

 certainty upon this point the evidence becomes utterly worthless ; 

 and Dr. Zacharias has acted very wisely in afterwards admitting 

 that this is the case, for inherent taillessness has been known in 

 cats for a long time. The tailless race of the Isle of Man is 

 mentioned in the first edition of ' The Origin of Species ' ; of 

 course I am referring to Darwin's work, and not to the above- 

 mentioned book of the same name, by Prof. Eimer. As to the first 

 origin of the tailless Manx breed we know no more than about the 



O 



origin of that remarkable race of cats with supernumerary toes, 

 which E. B. Poulton has recently described from Oxford, and has 

 traced through several generations 1 . These are innate mon- 



[' See ' Nature,' vol. xxix. p. 20, and vol. xxxv. p. 38. In the latter article nine 

 generations are recorded, and in both articles figures of the normal and abnormal feet 



