294 DARWINISM TO-DAY. 



possible, therefore, Romanes adds, that his own experiments were 

 not sufficiently numerous to have obtained such cases. 



"In this connection I may give an account of some observa- 

 tions that I made while carrying out some experiments in telegony 

 with mice. I found in one litter of mice that when the young came 

 out of the nest they were tailless. The same thing happened again 

 when the second litter was produced, but this time I made my 

 observation sooner, and examined the young mice immediately after 

 birth. I found that the mother had bitten off, and presumably 

 eaten, the tails of her offspring at the time of birth. Had I been 

 carrying on a series of experiments to see if, when the tails of the 

 parents were cut off, the young inherit the defect, I might have 

 been led into the error of supposing that I had found such a case in 

 these mice. If this idiosyncrasy of the mother had reappeared in 

 any of her descendants, the tails might have disappeared in suc- 

 ceeding generations. This perversion of the maternal instincts is 

 not difficult to understand, when we recall that the female mouse 

 bites off the navel-string of each of her young as they are born, 

 and at the same time eats the afterbirth. Her instinct was carried 

 further in this case, and the projecting tail was also removed. 



"Is it not possible that something of this sort took place in 

 Brown-Sequard' s experiment? The fact that the adults had eaten 

 off their own feet might be brought forward to indicate the possi- 

 bility of a perverted instinct in this case also. At least my obser- 

 vation shows a possible source of error that must be guarded 

 against in future work on this subject. 



"In regard to the 8th statement of Brown-Sequard, as to various 

 morbid states of the skin, Romanes did not test this, because the 

 facts which it alleges did not seem of a sufficiently definite character. 



"These experiments of Brown-Sequard, and of those who have 

 repeated them, may appear to give a brilliant experimental confirma- 

 tion of the Lamarckian position ; yet I think, if I were a Lamarckian, 

 I should feel very uncomfortable to have the best evidence in sup- 

 port of the theory come from this source, because there are a 

 number of facts in the results that make them appear as though 

 they might, after all, be the outcome of a transmitted disease, as 

 Weismann claims, rather than the inheritance of an acquired char- 

 acter. Until we know more of the pathology of epilepsy, it may 

 be well not to lay too great emphasis on these experiments. It 

 should not be overlooked that during the long time that the embryo 

 is nourished in the uterus of the mother, there is ample opportu- 

 nity given for the transmission of material, or possibly even of 

 bacteria. If it should prove true that epilepsy is due to some sub- 

 stance present in the nervous system, such substances could get 



