Again Weismann points out that the absence of a tail may not be owing to the mutilation of the mother but to the inherent taillessness of an unknown father. He proceeds to relate how during the year that Dr. Zacharias came with his collection, “My friend, Prof. Schottlius brought me a kitten with an innate rudimentary tail, which he had accidentally discovered as one of a family of kittens at Waldkirch, a small town in the southern part of the Black Forest. A closer investigation resulted in the following rather unexpected discovery. For some time past, tailless kittens have frequently appeared in the families of many different mother cats at Waldkirch, and this fact is explained in the following manner. A clergyman, who lived for some time at Waldkirch had married an English lady who possessed a tailless male Manx cat. The probability that all the tailless cats in Waldkirch are more or less distant descendants of that male cat amounts almost to certainty. Since a male Manx cat has reached the Black Forest, it might equally well arrive at some other place.” This very same year a popular scientific journal came to the rescue of the transmission theory with the following incident purporting to have taken place 22 years before, in 1864. “A pregnant merino sheep broke its right foreleg about two inches above the knee-joint; the limb was put in splints and healed a long time before the following March, when the animal produced young. The lamb possessed a ring of black wool from two to three inches in breadth round the place at which the mother’s leg had been broken, and upon the same leg.” When this incident was related to Weismann, he replied, “It is a pity that the black wool was not arranged in the form of the inscription ‘to the memory of the fractured leg of my dear mother.’” Writing in the following year Weismann says, “Furthermore, the mutilations of certain parts of the human body, as practised by different nations from time immemorial, have not in a single instance, led to the malformation or reduction of the parts in question. Such hereditary effects have been produced neither by circumcision nor the removal of the front teeth, nor the boring of holes in the lips or nose, nor the extraordinary artificial crushing and crippling of the feet of Chinese women. No child among any of the nations referred to possesses the slightest trace of these mutilations when born; they have to be acquired anew in each generation.”