Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/369

Rh with a thick, dark-brown hairy growth, about three inches in length, which spreads over on to either side. The hairs lie more smoothly on the border of the skin covering the sacrum, while in the middle they curl out into two strong tufts. The man is about five feet two inches high, and his yellowish-brown skin shows elsewhere on his whole body less than the usual hairiness. The recruit said that he was born with this unusual hair on his back, and that he had even in youth suffered on account of it from the curiosity of the people of his native village. He said also that the growth had once been so strong that he had braided the hair into queues and tied it in front, but that since then he had preferred to cut it from time to time. To test the accuracy of this assertion, Dr. Ornstein forbade his cutting the hair for a considerable period; and eight months afterward (December, 1875) the sacrum-hair had grown to double its former length, or to six inches; so that the recruit's assertions respecting it were shown not to be incredible.

Prof. Virchow accompanied the detailed communication of this case to the Berlin Anthropological Society with a few wellchosen words prefacing the opinion that we have perhaps to deal here with a spina bifida occulta, which is indicated exteriorly, as occurs often in the case of moles, mother's marks, etc., by augmented growth of hair. There has existed, he said, for a considerable time, a doctrine—we might call it a superstition—in pathological anatomy, which is called the law of the duplication of cases. "On the same morning that I received the letter from Athens, it was told me that there was a corpse in the Pathological Institute which exhibited an unusual hairiness on the back." Since we had to do in this case with a spina bifida occulta, there might perhaps be a similar pathological cause in the case of the Greek recruit. But the hair on the Berlin woman's back sprang from a higher spot, and did not denote the more thickly haired coccygeal region of the human embryo. In continuation of these efforts of Virchow to follow up these abnormal formations in the human body resembling animal shapes to their pathological causes, and in order to learn how to obviate them, Surgeon-General Ornstein kept watch upon the parts of the body concerned in the eruption, and in the next year (1876) succeeded in establishing a second case of well-defined sacral trichosis, marked by thick, dark-brown hair, extending to the coccygeal region. In the next year (1877) ten other cases fell under his attention, by which it became evident that this sacral hairiness was not rare in Greece and the islands of the Ægean Sea; and he was convinced that in all the cases the basis of it was normal and there was no question