Romanes states that he also found that injury to a particular spot of
the restiform bodies is quickly followed by a protrusion of the eye on
the same side, and further, that he had “also had many cases in which
some of the progeny of parents thus affected have shown considerable
protrusion of the eyeballs of both sides, and this seemingly abnormal
protrusion has occasionally been transmitted to the next generation.
Nevertheless, I am far from satisfied that this latter fact is anything
more than an accidental coincidence.” This reservation is made on the
ground that the protrusion in the young is never so great as in the
parents, and also because there is amongst guinea-pigs a considerable
amount of individual variation in the degree of prominence of the
eyeballs. Romanes, while unwilling to deny that an “obviously abnormal
amount of protrusion, due to the operation, may be inherited in lesser
degree,” is also unwilling to affirm so important a conclusion on the
basis of these experiments alone.
In regard to Brown-Séquard’s 6th statement, Romanes found after injury
to the restiform body that hæmatoma and dry gangrene may supervene,
either several weeks after the operation, or at any subsequent time,
even many months afterward. The disease usually affects the upper parts
of both ears, and may then gradually extend downward until nearly the
whole ear is involved. “As regards the progeny of animals thus affected
in some cases, but by no means in all, a similarly morbid state of the
ears may arise apparently at any time in the life history of the
individual. But I have observed that in cases where two or more
individuals _of the same litter_ develop this diseased condition, they
usually do so at about the same time, even though this may be months
after birth, and therefore after the animals are fully grown.” Moreover,
the morbid process never extends so far in the young as it does in the
parents, and “it almost always affects the middle third of the ear.”
Several of the progeny from this first generation, which had apparently
inherited the disease, but had not themselves been directly operated
upon, showed a portion of the ear consumed apparently by the same
disease. Romanes then gives the following significant analysis of this
result. Since a different part of the ear of the progeny is affected,
and also a “very much less quantity thereof,” it might seem that the
result was due either to a mere coincidence, or to the transmission of
microbes. But he goes on to say, that he fairly well excluded both of
these possibilities, for, in the first place, he has never observed “the
very peculiar process in the ears, or in any other parts of guinea-pigs
which have neither themselves had the restiform bodies injured, nor been
born of parents thus mutilated.” In regard to microbes, Romanes tried to
infect the ears of normal guinea-pigs by first scarifying these parts,
and then rubbing them with the diseased surfaces of the ears of affected
guinea-pigs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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