20 
to reproduce and perpetuate the more marked diseases of 
certain families, it need not be surprising if particular instances 
of family m al formations should, from time to time, be met 
with The transmission from one generation to another, lor 
example, of such defects as early baldness, greyness of hair, 
squint, harelip, &c., will perhaps be familiar to most persons. 
Other instances, however, of a less frequent character must be 
n °39 ' Thus it is a well-known fact that the thick lip introduced 
into the Imperial house of Austria by the marriage of the 
Emperor Maximilian with Mary of Burgundy, is visible in their 
descendants to the present day, after a lapse of three centuries. 
Mr Darwin, quoting the British and Foreign Ohirurgical I 
Review,* states a case in which congenital absence of the ms 
had been transmitted for three generations, and a cleft ins tor 
four generations in the male line. He also gives another in- 
stance of a family of sixteen sons and five daughters, all ot 
whom had eyes resembling in miniature the markings on the 
back of a tortoise-shell cat, adding that the mother of this large 
family had three sisters and a brother, each of whom were like- 
wise marked, and that they had derived this peculiarity from 
their mother, who belonged to a family which had Deen notorious 
for transmitting that defect to their posterity. 
40. A paper published in the Philosophical Transactions r ot 
1814+ records the particulars of a family which exhibited the 
peculiarity of supernumerary fingers and toes hereditarily 
transmitted through four generations. This defect had been 
introduced by a female who herself possessed six fingers on 
each hand and six toes on each foot. From the marriage of 
this woman with a man naturally formed were produced ten 
children with a supernumerary member on each limb ; and an 
eleventh child, in which the peculiarity existed m both feet 
and one hand. This eleventh child, being a girl, married a 
man of the ordinary formation, and had four children, of which 
three had one or two of the limbs in question formed naturally, 
and the rest with the supernumerary parts; while the tourtJti 
had six fingers on each hand and as many toes on each toot. 
The latter married a woman naturally formed, and had issue 
by her eight children; four with the usual structure, and the 
same number with supernumerary fingers or toes. Professor 
Huxley, in his lectures on the Origin of Species, gives an 
account of another case which may be equally relied on as 
authentic, and which he traces through three generations. 
* For April, 1861, pp. 482-6. ,, 
fi Part I. p. 94. Quoted from Lawrence’s Lectures on Man. 
