iv CASE OF SHORTENED FINGERS 179 



guinea-pigs in which one or both eyes showed more or less 

 morbid change, and which were descended from three indi- 

 viduals in which one eye had become diseased in conse- 

 quence of transverse section of the corpus restiforme. Lastly, 

 twenty guinea-pigs exhibited muscular atrophy on the upper 

 and lower sides of the thigh, in whose parents such atrophy 

 had been caused by section of the sciatic nerve. Mention 

 of Brown -Sequard's observation of the inheritance of the 

 loss of phalanges of the hind foot in guinea-pigs caused 

 by injury to the sciatic nerve, gives me an opportunity to 

 describe an extremely remarkable case of the inheritance of 

 congenital shortening or deformity of the fingers which I 

 observed in a young man studying in Tubingen this summer. 



Mr. - was a law student twenty years of age, and 

 meeting him by chance, I was much struck by the fact that 

 the second and third fingers on both his hands were much 

 shorter than usual, although his bodily structure was in other 

 respects perfectly normal. He kindly placed himself at my 

 disposal for the purpose of more exact examination. 



The result of this examination and the peculiarities of 

 inheritance in this case are so remarkable, that it would be 

 difficult to find another case comparable with it. With 

 regard to the inheritance, I will mention first that, according 



to the statement of Mr. , his mother and the youngest of 



his three brothers, who is fourteen years of age, have exactly 

 the same defect, while the eldest, twenty-one years, and the 

 third, sixteen years old, are without it. In the brother and 

 the mother the shortening is not so great as in himself. It 

 does not occur in other relatives. As to its causes nothing is 

 known to him. 



Exact investigation shows that in both hands the fourth 

 finger is much the longest, on the right the middle finger, on 

 the left the index finger is the shortest, so that leaving out 

 the thumb the following is the order of the fingers in size : 



