Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/364

350 and project free like an animal's tail, or that it might occasionally be prolonged through additions to the number of vertebræ; for they had a deeper insight into the normal agreement of the fundamental scheme in the structure of man and the animals most nearly related to him than some of the physicians and anatomists of our own time seem to have.

But after the great "fall of man," as Ecker expressively calls it, or after man had tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge which Darwin offered to him, we apparently did not dare to call the thing any more by its right name. We did not venture, according to Prof. His, to speak of the tail of the human embryo, although we could still speak without hesitation of its gill-arch. Man was ashamed, as Ecker has humorously characterized the prudery of the learned, only of his nearer, not of his more distant, cousins. The older anatomists and artists—we name here, as typical representatives of these, only Harvey, Meckel, and Goethe—found it natural that this taillet, instead of bending inward, as usual, toward the pelvis, and being buried in the muscular part, as though that were, of course, one of man's particular characteristics, should occasionally project outward and assume the form of an external tail. They did not regard it as surprising that a formation of this kind should sometimes appear; and they found in the persons who possessed such growths, not, like the men of the preceding age, the consequences of a bestial intercourse or of a fault of the mother; not even a monstrous formation in the common sense of the word, but rather evidence of the adaptability of Nature and of a common type marking all the higher animals. Thus Goethe wrote on the 12th of September, 1787, from Rome: "The tailed men are no wonder to me; but are, according to the description, something quite natural. There are much more wonderful things before our eyes which we do not regard, because they are not so nearly related to us."

The brief essay of Dr. O. Mohnike is based on the fact that all the forms of the backbone of man are related to his erect posture, and that the prolongation is turned inward in order to afford a support to the viscera, which is not needed in animals that go on all fours. He therefore believes that a prolongation of the coccyx outside of the periphery of the rump, analogous to the tail of an animal, would be incompatible with the typical human form, all the parts of which collectively point to the erect gait, and contradictory to it.

A similar inversion is indicated in the anthropoid apes, that have no external tail and sometimes go erect, and is believed by Hyrtl to be produced gradually in dogs and bears that are taught to dance on their hind legs. All this goes to show, if there were