WEISMANN'S THEORY OP HEREDITY 75 



Schottlius brought me a kitten with an in- 

 nate rudimentary tail, which he had accident- 

 ally discovered as one of a family of kittens 

 at Waldkirch, a small town in the southern 

 part of the Black Forest. A closer investiga- 

 tion resulted in the following rather unex- 

 pected discovery. For some time past, tailless 

 kittens have frequently appeared in the fam- 

 ilies of many different mother cats at Wald- 

 kirch, and this fact is explained in the follow- 

 ing manner. 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 m.ore or less distant descend- 

 ants of that male cat amounts almost to cer- 

 tainty. Since a male Manx cat has reached the 

 Black Forest, it might equally well arrive at 

 some other place." 



This very same year a popular scientific 

 journal came to the rescue of the transmission 

 theory with the following incident purporting 

 to have taken place 22 years before, in 1864. 

 "A pregnant merino sheep broke its right fore- 

 leg about two inches above the knee-joint; the 

 limb was put in splints and healed a long 

 time before the following March, when the 

 annimal produced young. The lamb possessed 

 a ring of black wool from two to three inches 



