428 THE SUPPOSED TRANSMISSION OF MUTILATIONS. 



A clergyman, who lived for some time at Waldkirch, had married 

 an English lady who possessed a tailless male Manx cat. .The 

 probability that all the tailless cats in Waldkirch are more or less 

 distant descendants of that male cat almost amounts to certainty. 

 Since a male Manx cat has reached the Black Forest, it might 

 equally well arrive at some other place. 



But we will now leave observations such as these, which do not 

 prove the transmission of a mutilation, because the mutilation itself 

 has not been established ; and we will turn to more serious ' proofs.' 



Let us still consider the tails of domesticated animals. In these 

 animals a spontaneous and considerable reduction of the tail occurs 

 not uncommonly, and since the habit of cutting off part of the tail 

 of young animals prevails in many countries, the coincidence has 

 been explained as a causal relation, and the question has been 

 raised whether the disposition towards the spontaneous appearance 

 of rudimentary tails has not arisen in consequence of the artificial 

 mutilation practised through many generations. This supposition 

 appears very plausible at first sight, but the keen scientific criticism 

 of Doderlein, Richter, and Bonnet, together with careful anatomical 

 investigations, have shown that, at least in the cases which were 

 carefully examined, such a causal connection did not exist. It 

 has been shown that the spontaneous rudimentary tails which 

 occasionally appear in cats and dogs have an entirely different 

 origin from the transmission of artificial mutilation. They depend 

 upon an innate peculiarity of the germ, a peculiarity which is 

 easily and strongly transmitted. They are monstrosities, like the 

 sixth finger or toe, or, rather, like the rudimentary fingers and 

 toes, which also occasionally appear. Bonnet 1 has shown that the 

 rudimentary tails of dogs depend upon the absence of several 

 vertebrae, together with an abnormal ossification, and sometimes 

 also with a premature coalescence, of the vertebrae of the tail. 



Bonnet states that in the two first cases examined by him the 

 reduction occurred at the distal end of the vertebral column in 

 the tail, the more or less malformed vertebrae being anchylosed. 

 A membranous appendage extended beyond the end of the reduced 



1 Bonnet, ' Die stummelschwiinzigen Hvmde im Hinblick auf die Vererbung er- 

 worbener Eigenschaften,' Anat. Anzeiger, Bd. Ill, 1888, p. 584; see also ' Beitrage 

 zur patholog. Anatomic und allgem. Pathologic' by Ziegler and Nauwerck, Bd. IV, 

 1888. 



