452 INHEraTANCE. Chap. XII. 



tion, asthma, stone in the bladder, cancer, profuse bleeding 

 from the slightest injuries, of the mother not giving milk, and 

 of bad parturition being inherited. In this latter respect I 

 may mention an odd case given by a good observer,^^ in 

 which the fault lay in the offspring, and not in the mother : 

 in a part of Yorkshire the farmers continued to select cattle 

 with large hind-quarters, until they made a strain called 

 " Dutch-buttocked," and " the monstrous size of the buttocks 

 of the calf was frequently fatal to the cow, and numbers of 

 cows were annually lost in calving." 



Instead of giving numeroiis details on various inherited malform- 

 ations and diseases, I will confine myself to one organ, that which is 

 the most complex, delicate, and probably best-known in the human 

 frame, namely, the eye, with its accessory parts.^^ To begin with the 

 latter : I have received an account of a family ia which one parent 

 and the children are affected by drooping eyelids, in so peculiar a 

 manner, that they cannot see without throwing then- heads back- 

 wards. Mr. Wade, of Wakefield, has given me an analogous case of 

 a man who had not his eyelids thus affected at birth, nor owed 

 their state, as far as was known, to inheritance, but they began to 

 droop whilst he was an infant after suffering from fits, and he has 

 transmitted the affection to two out of his three children, as was 

 evident in the photographs of the whole family sent to me together 

 with this account. Sh A. Carlisle " specifies a pendulous fold to 

 the eyelids, as inherited. " In a family," says Sir H. Holland,^" 

 " where the father had a singular elongation of the upper eyelid, 

 seven or eight children were born with the same deformity ; two or 

 three other children having it not." Many persons, as I hear from 

 Sir J. Paget, have two or three hairs in their eyebrows much longer 

 than the others ; and even so trifling a pecuharity as this certainly 

 runs in families. 



With respect to the eye itself, the highest authority in England, 

 Mr. Bowman, has been so kind as to give me the following remarks 

 on certain inherited imperfections. First, hypermetropia, or 

 morbidly long sight : in this affection, the organ, instead of being 

 spherical, is too flat from front to back, and is often altogether too 

 small, so that the retina is brought too forward for the focus of the 

 humours ; consequently a convex glass is required for clear vision 



" Marshall, quoted by Youatt in others have been communicated to 



lis work on Cattle, p. 284. me. 



" Almost any other organ might '* ' Philosoph. Transact.,' 1814-, p. 



nave been selected. For instance. 94-. 



Mr. J. Tomtk, ' System of Dental '^ ' Medical Notes and Reflections,' 



Surgery,' 2nd edit., 1873, p. 114, 3rd edit., p. 33. 

 gives many instances with teeth, and 



