Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/370

356 of a spina bifida. Virchow's law of the duplication of the cases had not maintained itself under the first test. Of the various other persons of this kind whose photographs Dr. Ornstein took, we mention the recruit Q. G. Nikephorus, of Siphno, twenty years old, in whom the thick brown hair of the sacral trichosis is very sharply defined, and quite covers the sacrum. The hairs were in this case from one and a half to two and three quarter inches long, while no abnormal hairs were visible on the rest of his somewhat slender body.

It requires no particular gift for adapting evidence or of divination to infer from these cases of sacral trichosis, so frequent in Greece, which are easily explained by reference to the embryonic hairy covering, that the representations of Silenus and the fauns in ancient Grecian art, in which this part of the body is furnished with a tail-tuft of hair, may be traced back to casual observations of such cases in real life. A strikingly naturalistic illustration of this view is afforded by the Silenus with the Bacchus child in the Louvre, in which, instead of the isolated horse-tail-like pencil rising from the sacrum, characteristic of most figures of the kind, the whole sacral region is represented as well haired, while the central lock is simply more strongly prominent (Fig. 6).

What might be called "hide-bound tails," of which Dr. Bartels describes a Well-marked case that occurred in his own medical practice, incline more decidedly to the order of real malformations. In a three-days-old child, the skin over the coccyx formed a three-sided lump of about the shape of the tail-termination of the embryo. This lump was about seven eighths of an inch long, rose several lines above the rest of the skin, and was separated from it by a plainly defined groove. The pointed lower end of the swelling seemed to lie directly over the anal orifice, which was very narrow, and must have been operatively enlarged after the