=Epilepsy in Guinea-Pigs.--=Perhaps the most frequently cited case and the one in which the defenders of the idea of somatic inheritance usually take final refuge is that of Doctor Brown-Sequard's guinea-pigs, notwithstanding the fact that no one has had convincing success in repeating the experiments and that the original results are apparently open to more than one interpretation. This experimenter rendered guinea-pigs epileptic by certain injuries to the nervous system. Epilepsy appeared in some of the offspring of these operated animals. He regarded this as an example of the inheritance of an artificially induced epilepsy. An indirect loss of toes occurred in some of the parents as a result of the operations on the nervous system. Some of their young also had missing toes. However, as has been pointed out by various critics, guinea-pigs are strongly predisposed toward epileptic-like seizures, and the epilepsy in the young may have been merely a coincidence. Voison and Peron believe they have shown that in epilepsy a toxin is produced that may affect the unborn fetus. That is, the result might have been due to a poison derived directly from the mother. The experiments in fact show that it was mainly in the offspring of affected mothers that the condition appeared. Others maintain that we do not know the exact nature of epilepsy, that in some cases it may be the result of infection by disease-germs, and that Brown-Sequard's cases may, therefore, have been merely the communication of a disease from parent to child. As to the disappearance of toes it is a well-known fact that rodents in particular are likely to gnaw off the toes of their young very soon after birth, and little credence can be put in a lack of toes in such young as cases of inheritance except under conditions of much more careful observation than existed in Brown-Sequard's experiments. A fuller account of these experiments will be found in Romanes' _Darwin and After Darwin_, Vol. II, Chap. 6. =Effects of Mutilations Not Inherited.--=Many experiments have been performed by investigators to determine whether or not the results of mutilation are transferred to succeeding generations, but so far only with negative results. Many such experiments have been unwittingly carried on for many generations, in fact, by breeders and fanciers, in the docking of horses, dogs and sheep, the dehorning of cattle and the like, yet no satisfactory evidence of the transmission of such conditions in any degree has ever been forthcoming. The mutilations or distortions of the human body through various rites or social customs also fails to yield any convincing examples. Foot-binding, head-binding, or waist-binding must be repeated in each successive generation to produce the particular type of "beauty" that results from such deformities. And lucky it is for man that injuries do not persist in subsequent generations, otherwise the modern human being would be but a maimed relic of past misfortunes.