In not a single case was the disease produced.
Romanes concludes that these “results in large measure corroborate the
statements of Brown-Séquard; and it is only fair to add that he told me
they were the results which he had himself obtained most frequently, but
that he had also met with many cases where the diseased condition of the
ears in parents affected the same parts in their progeny and also
occurred in more equal degrees.”
We come now to the remarkable conclusion given in Brown-Séquard’s 7th
statement, in regard to the absence of toes in animals whose parents had
eaten off their own hind toes and even parts of their legs. Romanes got
neuroses in the animals operated upon, and found that the toes might be
eaten off; but none of the young showed any defect in these parts.
Furthermore, Romanes repeated the same operation upon the descendants
through six successive generations, so as to produce, if possible, a
cumulative effect, but no inheritance of the mutilation was observed.
“On the other hand, Brown-Séquard informed me that he had observed this
inherited absence of toes only in about one or two per cent of cases.”
It is possible, therefore, Romanes adds, that his own experiments were
not sufficiently numerous to have obtained such cases.
In this connection I may give an account of some observations 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 reappeared in
any of her descendants, the tails might have disappeared 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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