Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/363

Rh a half long, which, when sucking, he wagged as a token of pleasure.

Apparently well-authenticated instances of human tails are that of a Moi boy, twelve years old, who was found a few years ago in Cochin-China, and had a tail about a foot long—simply a mass of flesh—containing no bony frame (Fig. 1); and the case communicated to the Berlin Anthropological Society in July, 1890, by the Dutch resident at Ternate, of two natives of New Guinea, who had come on board his steamer in Geelvink Bay, in 1880—adult male Papuans, in good health and spirits, well shaped and muscular, who had coccygeal bones projecting four centimetres, or an inch and a half in length. Dr. O. W. Holmes says, in the Atlantic Monthly for June, 1890, that Dr. Priestley, of London, showed him, at the Medical Congress in Washington, a photograph of a boy who had "a very respectable tail."

In The Popular Science Monthly for October, 1884, an account was quoted from Mr. H. W. Eaton, of Louisville, Ky., of a female child that was born in that city with what appeared to be a rudimentary tail. It was visible as a "fleshy peduncular protuberance," about two inches and a quarter long, and measuring an inch and a quarter round the base, shaped like a pig's tail, but showing no sign of bone or cartilage, and was situated about an inch above the lower end of the spinal column. It had grown about a quarter of an inch in eight weeks.

The questions, whether there exists in the human body, in a rudimentary state, a real homologue of the tail of animals, and whether it may sometimes be developed into a member of somewhat similar outward form, have been much discussed by physiologists in recent years. Besides notes on the subject in anthropological, ethnographical, and geographical periodicals, four larger essays have been published upon it, viz.: Mohnike's pamphlet on Tailed Men (Münster, 1878); two papers by Prof. A. Ecker, in the Archiv für Anthropologie (vol. xii, 1879), and in the Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie (1880, No. 6); and a paper by Dr. Max Bartels in the Archiv für Anthropologie (1880); all of which go into a searching consideration of the subject. The late German scientific journal Kosmos, reviewing these papers a few years years ago, deduced the following conclusions from the evidence then before the world:

The older anatomists treated the question in rather a matter-of-fact way. They regarded the prolongation of the human backbone beyond the os sacrum, by three, four, or five vertebrae, without much thought, as the analogous feature of the animal's tail, and called it the tail-bone (os coccygis). The phenomenon was not rare to them, nor did it seem wonderful that this part of the body could, contrariwise to its general rule, escape being grown over.