ACQUIRED CHARACTERS 75 



a. Mutilations 



It is fortunate that the sons of warriors do not 

 inherit their fathers' honorable scars of battle, else 

 we would now be a race of cripples. 



The feet of Chinese women of certain classes have 

 for centuries been mutilated into deformity by ban- 

 daging, without the mutilation in any way becoming 

 an inherited character. The same result is also true 

 of tattooing and of circumcision, the latter a mutila- 

 tion practised from ancient times by the Jews and 

 certain other Eastern peoples. The progressive degen- 

 eration or crippling of the little toe in man has been 

 explained as the inheritance of the cramping effect 

 of shoes upon generations of shoe wearers, but, as 

 Wiedersheim has pointed out, the fact that Egyptian 

 mummies show the same crippling of the little toe is 

 unfavorable to this hypothesis, for no ancient Egyptian 

 could ever be accused of wearing shoes or of having 

 had shoe-wearing ancestors. Sheep and horses with 

 docked tails as well as dogs with trimmed ears never 

 produce young having the parental mutilation. 



Weismann's classic experiment with mice, an experi- 

 ment subsequently confirmed by others, is additional 

 negative evidence upon this same point. What Weis- 

 mann did was to breed mice whose tails had been cut 

 off short at birth. He continued this decaudalization 

 through twenty-two generations with absolutely no 

 effect upon the tail-length of the new-born mice. 

 One may see in the catacombs of the Zoologisches 

 Institut at Freiburg, filed carefully away on shelves, 



