The Inheritance of Acquired Characters 53 
If a particular spot of the restiform body of the brain is 
injured, a marked protrusion of the eyeball quickly follows. 
The progeny of parents thus affected show also an abnormal 
protrusion. Romanes also observed this, but he found that the 
young show less protrusion than do the parents, and since the 
amount of protrusion of the eyeball is variable in normal guinea 
pigs, Romanes is not certain that there is anything more than a 
coincidence in the cases that he observed. 
An injury to the restiform body may also cause dry gangrene 
(and hematoma) in the ears. This disease may appear either 
several weeks after the operation or even later. It affects, 
Romanes says, usually the upper parts of both ears and may 
gradually “eat its way down”’ until two thirds of the tissues of 
the ears are affected. In the offspring from animals of this sort 
a morbid condition of the ears may arise at any time in their 
lives, even after they have become full grown. The disease 
does not go so far as in the parents, and ‘‘almost always affects 
the middle third of the ears.” Romanes points out that this 
particular disease never appears amongst guinea pigs unless 
their own or their parents’ restiform bodies have been injured. 
. Furthermore, he tested the possibility that the results are due 
to contagion by inoculating “corresponding parts of the ears 
of normal guinea pigs by first scarifying those parts and then 
rubbing them with the diseased surfaces of the ears of muti- 
lated guinea pigs.” The disease was not communicated in 
this way. 
Brown-Séquard found that after cutting the sciatic nerve (or 
this and the crural also) the leg became anesthetic, and the 
guinea pigs would sometimes eat off two or three of their hind 
toes. In the offspring of these animals he found sometimes 
an absence of toes, or only a part of one or more of the toes 
might be missing. The inheritance occurred in only one or 
two per cent of cases. Romanes, who repeated the operation 
through six successive generations, never obtained any results. 
Another outcome of injury to the sciatic nerve is to induce 
“morbid states of the skin and hair of the neck and face in 
