Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/373

Rh The myths of tailed human races constantly revert to the East Indian islands; and the Dutch captain, L. F. W. Schulze, sent communications to the Berlin Anthropological Society in 1877 concerning cases partly observed by himself, which were regarded by Dr. Bartels as fully trustworthy. These communications tell us nothing new, for the phenomena occur in cultivated Europe as well as in remote deserts and lone islands. Other reports, like that, for example, of Julius Kögel concerning the Dyaks of Borneo, speak of the frequent occurrence of tailed individuals. Hence a low, beastly race has been supposed, in which atavistic formations occur still more frequently than among' higher races further removed from the original condition. Still other reports, and more recent, mention fully tailed human races.

Even if a phenomenon of this kind were established we need not, as Dr. Bartels has justly remarked, conceive of a still living middle form between man and beast. "We must consider," he says, "that we are all the time dealing with insular populations who have been crowded out of the possession of their coast and harbor regions by people of other races and driven into the hardly accessible interior of the country, where they have been compelled to practice, for a length of time we can not estimate, a constant inbreeding—a regular series of marriages within their own tribe. In this case there might, at some time in the past, as has happened with other men, have occurred an external tail, as a casual abnormity at first, but which might afterward, in the course of generations, become transmitted to many persons by inheritance. For it has been shown by researches in this interesting field of pathological anatomy that nothing is more easily transmissible than malformations. In illustration of this fact we need only mention here the well-known inclination to the inheritability of what are called mother's marks and hare-lips, and the large teeth of the Melanesians of the Admiralty Islands and the island of Agome, which have been described by Mr. Miklucho-Maclay. In a similar manner Lord Monboddo, in the last century, explained the tailed men of Borneo as a people afflicted with a hereditary malformation, and compared them with sixfingered families.

In agreement with this is what the Wesleyan missionary George Brown related in 1870 con(erning a formal breeding of a tailed race of men in Kali, off New Britain. "Tailless children," he says, "are slain at once, or they would be exposed to general ridicule." A tailed family of princes have borne rule in Rajpootana and are earnestly attached to the ancestral mark. Dr.