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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
Quatrefages also speaks of the appearance of such varieties of men as very probable. The care just mentioned as having been taken of the malformation is all the more striking because the tail, as has been shown in the European cases, is in sitting and riding no very pleasant feature. They tell of canoes in the East Indies that have holes made in the benches of the rowers. But it is not an idle thought in this matter to suppose that the benches, like the old German stools, were furnished with holes for ornament, or in order that they might be more easily handled and disposed of, and the incident can not be regarded as confirming the popular legend. The result of these investigations is, as a whole, that a formation, homologous even in outside appearance with an animal's tail, is originally present in the human fœtus, and loses its external characteristics at a later period of life through arrest of growth, inversion, and waste. If these processes occasionally fail to take place, the tail-feature is nevertheless not visible in the grown man, and we can not draw from such malformations, even if they appear frequently in a single race, any one-sided conclusions respecting there having existed a former animal-like condition. For it may be supposed with much more probability, from the similarity of the forms in this feature of man and the anthropoid apes, that their common ancestor had already shed the external tail; and hence that the prolongation of the chorda in the embryo, with no vertebra contained in it, may be regarded as a reminiscence of a still earlier ancestral form.