TRANSMISSION OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS 



Prof. Haeckel * records that a bull on a farm near Jena had 

 its tail squeezed off at the root by the accidental slamming of 

 the byre-door, and that it had thereafter a tail-less progeny. This 

 is very interesting, but we are bound to ask (i) how often tail- 

 less cattle arise apart from curtailing by the byre-door ; (2) 

 whether the bull had any tail-less offspring before it was cur- 

 tailed ; (3) how many tail-less offspring it actually had, and so on. 

 It may be that the answers to these questions would be quite satis- 

 factory, but, to make the case cogent, the questions should have been 

 forestalled. 



In 1874 Herr W. Besler, in Emmerich on the Rhine, wrote to Prof. 

 L. Biichner (1882, p. 24) to report the following case. At Dobeln, 

 in Saxony, at Eichler's Hotel there, he saw a young dog apparently 

 bereft of ears and tail. When he remarked that the beast had been 

 far too much cut, he was told that this was not the case, for it and 

 its brother had been born so, out of a litter of four. The mother 

 was normal, the father was an " Affen-Pinscher," whose ears and 

 tail had been cut. The same condition had occurred once in a pre- 

 vious litter. Supposing that this was more than an ostler's yarn, 

 we should have to inquire into the ancestry of the father and mother* 

 to see whether inborn shortness of ears and tail had ever manifested 

 itself in the family. 



Prof. Biichner also relates that in the autumn of 1873 a build- 

 ing-contractor, K , in Westphalia, bought a duck whose right 



" wing-bone " had been broken and had mended in a crooked fashion. 

 Next spring the duck had four ducklings, two of which showed on 

 the right wing, and two on both wings, an extra feathered wing 

 (4-5 in. in length), protruding immovably at an angle of 45 above 

 the otherwise normal wing. But this duplicity, if such it was 

 bore no precise relation to the original injury, and probably was 

 quite unconnected with it. 



Biichner gives a number of other instances. Thus Williamson 

 saw dogs in Carolina which had been tail-less for three or four genera- 

 tions, .one of the ancestors having lost the tail by accident. f But 

 tail-lessness is also known as a germinal variation. 



Bronn J describes the case of a cow which lost one horn by ulcera- . 

 tion ; it had afterwards three calves which showed on the same side 



* Schbpfungs-Geschtchte, ed. 1870, p. 102. 



f Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvolker, i. p. 93. 



J Geschichte der Natur, 1871, p. 96. 



