Inheritance of Acquired Characters 255 
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 observations 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 reap- 
peared in any of her descendants, the tails might have disap- 
peared in succeeding 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-Séquard’s experiment ? The fact that the adults had 
eaten off their own feet might be brought forward to indicate 
the possibility of a perverted instinct in this case also. At least 
my observation 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-Séquard, 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-Séquard, and of those who 
have repeated them, may appear to give a brilliant experi- 
mental confirmation of the Lamarckian position; yet I think, 
