334 NATURE AND LIFE. 



mering, nasal speaking, slurring the r, etc. Families of 

 singers are numerous. Most children born of talkative 

 people chatter from their cradle. Dr. Lucas mentions an 

 instance of a servant of boundless loquacity. She talked 

 people utterly out of breath ; she would chatter to animals, 

 to things ; she gabbled aloud to herself. Her master was 

 obliged to dismiss her. " But," she said, " it is not my 

 fault, it comes from my father ; it was so strong in him that 

 it drove my mother wild, and he had a father exactly like 

 me in that." 



Heredity in anomalies of the organization has been no- 

 ticed in a great number of cases. One of the strangest is 

 that of Edward Lambert, whose body, excepting his face, 

 the palms of his hands, and the soles of his feet, was cov- 

 ered with a sort of armor of horny excrescences. He had 

 six children, all of whom, from six weeks of age, showed 

 the same singularity. The only one that survived trans- 

 mitted it, like his father, to all his sons, and this transmis- 

 sion, passing from male to male, continued for five genera- 

 tions. The Colburn family is mentioned also, in which the 

 parents transmitted to the children, during four genera- 

 tions, what is called sexdigitism, that is, six fingers on each 

 hand, and feet with six toes each. In the same way al- 

 binism, lameness, hare-lip, and other anomalies, are repro- 

 duced in the progeny. It has been observed that entirely 

 individual peculiarities may be subject to a like tendency 

 to reappearance. Giron de Buzareingues says that he 

 knew a man who had the habit, when in bed, of lying on 

 his back and crossing the right leg over the left one. One 

 of his daughters was born with the same habit ; she regu- 

 larly took that position in the cradle, in spite of the impedi- 

 ment of her baby-dress. The same author declares that he 

 has often remarked children who had inherited habits 

 equally singular, which could be accounted for neither by 

 imitation nor by education. Darwin mentions another 



