CONGENITAL DEFORMITIES.--Professor Weismann, in replying to the criticisms of Professor Virchow, admitted the existence of a number of congenital deformities, birthmarks and other individual peculiarities, which are inherited, but he affirms that we do not know from what causes they first appeared, and that a great proportion of them proceed from the germ itself, and are due, therefore, to alteration of the germinal substance. There is no proof of this, however, according to Dr. Eimer,[80:A] who appeals to various facts in support of his contention that injuries and diseases are inherited. He thinks the degeneration of the tail in the higher mammals is a case in point, although it has required great periods of time to complete. Among other instances of inherited injuries mentioned by Dr. Eimer is one in which a scar over the left ear and temple, caused to a girl by being thrown from a carriage, was transmitted to her son and grandson, the son of the latter also showing absence of hair on the injured spot, although the defect gradually disappeared with him, nearly a hundred years after the accident. The case of Dr. Nosseler, who inherited from his mother a crushed finger joint, caused by an accident which happened two years before his birth, would seem to be conclusive proof that injuries are transmissible. Dr. Eimer refers also to the breeding of short-tailed pointers from dogs whose tails had been artificially shortened; and also to Brown-Sequard's experiments with guinea pigs, in which epilepsy was inherited by their offspring, who showed also the loss of certain phalanges, or even whole toes of the hind feet, the parents having suffered a similar loss owing to the division of the sciatic nerve. He adds that numerous other instances of the inheritance of injuries have been recorded, as "inheritance of the artificially shortened tail of the bull, of artificially produced hornlessness in cattle, many cases of inheritance in man of curvature in a finger, caused by injury, inheritance of the absence of one eye which had been lost by the father during life or by disease, etc."