I observed a very similar case during my stay in Ceylon (at Belligemma) in 1881. A young Cinghalese in his twenty-fifth year was brought to me as a curious hermaphrodite, half-man and half-woman. His large breasts gave plenty of milk; he was employed as “male nurse” to suckle a new-born infant whose mother had died at birth. The outline of his body was softer and more feminine than in the Greek shown in Fig. 104. As the Cinghalese are small of stature and of graceful build, and as the men often resemble the women in clothing (upper part of the body naked, female dress on the lower part) and the dressing of the hair (with a comb), I first took the beardless youth to be a woman. The illusion was greater, as in this remarkable case gynecomastism was associated with _cryptorchism_—that is to say, the testicles had kept to their original place in the visceral cavity, and had not travelled in the normal way down into the scrotum. (Cf. Chapter XXIX.) Hence the latter was very small, soft, and empty. Moreover, one could feel nothing of the testicles in the inguinal canal. On the other hand, the male organ was very small, but normally developed. It was clear that this apparent hermaphrodite also was a real male. Another case of practical gynecomastism has been described by Alexander von Humboldt. In a South American forest he found a solitary settler whose wife had died in child-birth. The man had laid the new-born child on his own breast in despair; and the continuous stimulus of the child’s sucking movements had revived the activity of the mammary glands. It is possible that nervous suggestion had some share in it. Similar cases have been often observed in recent years, even among other male mammals (such as sheep and goats). The great scientific interest of these facts is in their bearing on the question of heredity. The stem-history of the mammarium rests partly on its embryology (Chapter XXIV.) and partly on the facts of comparative anatomy and physiology. As in the lower and higher mammals (the monotremes, and most of the marsupials) the whole lactiferous apparatus is only found in the female; and as there are traces of it in the male only in a few younger marsupials, there can be no doubt that these important organs were originally found only in the female mammal, and that they were acquired by these through a special adaptation to habits of life. Later, these female organs were communicated to both sexes by heredity; and they have been maintained in all persons of either sex, although they are not physiologically active in the males. This normal permanence of the female lactiferous organs in _both_ sexes of the higher mammals and man is independent of any selection, and is a fine instance of the much-disputed “inheritance of acquired characters.” Chapter XII. EMBRYONIC SHIELD AND GERMINATIVE AREA